H.L. Mencken,
caustic critic of contemporary whims and vagaries, was once
asked why, if he found so much to complain about in America, he
bothered to live there. "Why do men go to zoos?" he replied.
And if you don't complain how
will anything improve? |
 |
America Gets the Best Terrorism
Money Can Buy
05.02.10 In case you haven’t been reading the
news
lately, America is in a very serious state of trouble, and even
worse, there’s no clear way to get out of it. What I’m
specifically referring to is the out-of-control military
spending machine, what President Dwight Eisenhower ominously
called the Military-Industrial Complex decades ago.
America’s foreign policy, having been thoroughly hijacked by
Zionist interests (a political machine often referred to as the
Israel Lobby), has created a nefarious niche for another beast –
the insatiable animal of military and security contractors. The
more fear and insecurity the more need for cities, states, and
federal governments around the world to buy weapons and pay for
spies, police and soldiers.
One example, the U$ military and CIA operate
remotely-piloted aircraft with cameras and missiles that can
find and kill anyone anywhere in a matter of minutes,
including U.S. citizens that the President labels ‘terrorists’.
These drone aircraft have been flying over Pakistan, for
instance, while incinerating alleged militants and
everyone around them (without even a judge, jury or trial) at a
rapidly increasing pace and justifiably enraging the people
there.
What would American’s think if Chinese spy
agencies started flying military aircraft over the United States
and killing Americans with missile attacks? Yet somehow,
according to the New York Times and FOX News, the
people in Pakistan are supposed to be grateful. So, the
establishment in New York and Washington DC absolutely loves
these drone attacks, so much so that they're buying hundreds
more at a frenetic pace. The military industry gets billons to
build them, the contractors get millions to operate them, while
the Christian Fundamentalists and the Israel Lobby get plenty of
dead or angry Muslims to rejoice over.
The insidious aspect of this cycle is that the
more the United States attacks people around the world, the more
authorities fear a reprisal, what they call “terrorism”, and the
more need for “security” to shield against violent reactions.
Not coincidentally, this is exactly the same twisted policy that
Israel has adopted against the Palestinians and neighboring Arab
states. It’s the perfect recipe for endless war, or more to the
point, a perfect recipe for limitless spending on military and
security, police and guns.
In a blatant statement of true priories,
President Obama froze government spending on everything except
military and security! So, even though one in eight Americans now needs
food aid just to keep from going hungry, and unemployment is at
levels not seen since the Great Depression, there’s very little
public resistance to this cycle of exporting state violence to
justify a bloated domestic security apparatus. Largely this is
simply because the only reliable jobs anyone can get in America
are in the security industry! This one is sewn up pretty tight.
Congress is an active part of the problem, they
fight against any cuts to the military and police establishment
because it means jobs in their districts and it contradicts the
wishes of the Israel Lobby. So, protests against this
militarized policy of national suicide are bound to be mostly
ineffective. Widespread and concerted grass-roots protests and
awareness campaigns would be effective, but would still have to
overcome a headwind of resistance from conservative cultural
values that blindly support the nation and officials be they
right or wrong. In fact, the pocketbook is the most effective
way to reason with Americans, but unfortunately it looks like a
lot more than 12% of the country is going to have to go hungry
before any organized resistance takes place.
Nobody really believes that America can keep
spending trillions of Dollars on weapons and a police-state that
can’t even provide stated benefits of safety and security, but
the system is incapable of regulating itself – it’s just like a
hopeless drug-addict doomed to consume until they drop dead.
Predator Picnic
(The Best Terrorism Money Can Buy) |
June 2009 |
Over 30 years of war and America fights in circles against
self-created opponents in Afghanistan:
[T]he fervent American jihad of the 1980s
involved the CIA slipping happily into a crowded bed with the
Saudis, the Pakistanis and the most extreme Islamist
fundamentalists among the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters. In those
years, the agency didn't hesitate to organize car-bomb and even
camel-bomb terror attacks on the Russian military (techniques
endorsed by CIA director William Casey). The partnership of
these groups wasn't surprising at the time, given that Casey,
himself a Cold War fundamentalist and supporter of Opus Dei,
believed that the anti-communism of the most extreme Islamist
fundamentalists made them the US's natural allies in the region.
With that in mind, in tandem with Saudi funders, the CIA
provided money, arms, training and support (as well as thousands
of American-printed Korans). The funds and arms were all
funneled through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
At the time, the US's generosity even included offering Stinger
missiles, the most advanced hand-held, ground-to-air weapon of
the era, to favored Afghans. The CIA also came to favor the most
extreme of the jihadis, particularly two figures: Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani.
In the early 1990s, after the Soviets left in defeat, the
jihadis descended into a wretched civil war, and Washington
essentially jumped ship, a new movement, the Taliban, initially
a creation of the ISI (with at least implicit American backing
at least some of the time), almost swept the boards in
Afghanistan, creating a fundamentalist Islamic state in most of
the country.
Now, leap forward a couple decades. In that same country, who
exactly is the US military fighting? As it happens, the answer
is: the forces of the old Taliban, rejuvenated by an American
occupation, as well as its two key allies, the warlords
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who are now the US's
sworn enemies. And the US is pouring more billions of dollars,
weaponry and significant blood into defeating them.
From: Lessons from the long war,
by Tom Engelhardt, ATO, October 22, 2009.
They reap impoverishment from a promise of salvation
|
January 2010 |
Business as Usual
07.09.09 President Obama is doing just about everything he can
to convince us that he’s George W. Bush’s third term, expanding
wars, using secrecy to hide criminal actions; you know the
routine. The Obama administration is heaping more evidence on
the pile to prove that it doesn’t matter whether American’s vote
for a Republican or a Democrat as president they’ll get the same
shoddy treatment. It’s increasingly difficult to ignore that
although this corrupt establishment has two different-looking
sides it still consists of one coin.
Speaking of coins, what should have been a house-cleaning for
the bloated U.S. financial industry has turned into a windfall
as profits go up even higher with the timely intervention of
trillions of taxpayer dollars from the federal government. Even
with profit margins of 20-30% for years the credit card
divisions of the giant American banks are fiendishly busy
raising interest rates and developing even more ways to charge
fees for everything that used to be free.
Corporate America has used the recession to fire everyone they
can, while forcing the remaining workers to run even faster in
the little hamster wheel. Official statistics show that
productivity is at record levels even as average wages have
declined. Meanwhile, many of these same average Americans
are feverishly fighting against ‘socialist’ medical care. They
may not have any idea what socialism really is or what they’re
fighting against but they follow the slogans like a moth to a
candle flame, and remain scared out of their minds of losing the
(socialistic) health care they already have, like federal
Medicare.
“One of the
Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a
fight and was injured – and then complained he had no health
insurance.”
The United States remains the only industrialized country in the
world that doesn’t offer medical care to all its citizens. What
America does have in the form of private, for-profit medical
corporations, are responsible for half of all bankruptcies.
America's medical industry is rapidly strangling the country and
wrecking social development and international competitiveness
under the tenacious adherence to the woefully misguided belief
that health-care is just another consumable product to be sold
to the highest bidder. Europeans that start a small business,
for example, don’t have to worry about going bankrupt over
health-care costs. And America retains other top rankings too,
including the ignoble status of being the only major country
that doesn’t offer everyone legally guaranteed vacation time.
The list goes on because it’s business as usual in America.
News Flash to America: The
World’s Out of Money
21.03.09
In a startling move the Federal Reserve announced
that they will begin printing (virtual) money to buy U.S.
Treasury bonds, a move they call ‘quantitative easing’, which is
just an intentionally confusing term for plain old-fashioned
monetary inflation. And this is massive inflation; $300 billion
dollars worth just for starters.
 This
is disturbing news for several reasons, most obviously because
it means the value of the Dollar is set to rapidly depreciate,
probably by a significant factor, and because this desperate
move is basically the last one the Fed can make – and it’s early
in the game to be playing the inflation card. Metaphorically
speaking, the Fed has fired all of their ammunition and all they
can do now is throw the gun at the approaching monster.
Why is the Fed, in conjunction with the Obama
administration and in perfect sync with the prior Bush-Cheney
regime, doing this? Well, it’s true that the United Kingdom and
even Switzerland, among other central banks of the world, are
already doing their own quantitative easing. But the monetary
scale of the United States isn’t anything like Switzerland or
the UK; it’s on a totally different level much, much larger.
What the Dollar does directly affects the entire world economy.
But the reason the Fed is printing money is because the world
economy is influencing the US. The scale of the debt needed to
finance a series of government bailouts and financial rescue
schemes, each one bigger than the last, has finally exceeded the
capital capacity of the entire world to pay for them! The US
federal government’s budget deficit for the year is racing
towards an incredible $2 trillion dollars.
Unless the people in charge of the Federal
Reserve and Treasury are criminally incompetent or criminally
corrupt, and both they may be, the only legitimate explanation
for resorting to pure monetary inflation at this early stage in
the recession, bordering on depression, is because they simply
can’t raise enough capital in bond auctions to fund government
operations. And the latest numbers support this contention.
Instead of billions of Dollars flowing into the US from foreign
investors, the flow has reversed and they’re now taking their
money out!
Since the US Dollar is the primary world currency
Dollar turmoil will mean worldwide economic turmoil. For
Americans this means that imports will become more expensive and
for exporters it means they will have a harder time selling in
the US. Investors have only two options, they can buy gold or
perhaps key commodities like oil, or they can bet against the
Dollar on currencies that aren’t inflating.
|
It's not a lie if we can make you believe it |
October 2008 |
Welcome to the Death-Spiral of
America's Credit Capitalism
[05&10.10.08] The numbers keep getting worse. Manufacturing
in the US has taken a sudden and precipitous decline,
construction has crashed, housing prices are plunging, and
mortgage defaults continue unabated. Not only that but an
estimated one in eight jobs in the US are related to housing! The world’s largest insurance company, AIG,
required a federal rescue. The
FDIC that insures bank deposits is woefully undercapitalized
with something like $50 billion to try and protect trillions
in bank deposits. This as the country’s largest savings and
loan bank, Washington Mutual, has collapsed, along with about
13 other major banks over the past year – and with many more
to follow.
Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald, said
investors are worried about the spread of troubles beyond
banks in the U.S. to Europe and other markets. "Things are
dying and breaking apart," he said.
Platitudes and disingenuous reassurances from
business bosses and political authorities have given way to
fear, panic, and demands for massive financial bailouts using
taxpayer funding. Congress is more than willing to write
checks using taxpayer money for whatever amount the financial
and business sectors want, but the public outrage is so
widespread and intense that the politicians are forced to put
up a show of resistance to big-business’ dictates while
sugar-coating their rescue package of nearly one trillion
dollars.
The numbers are so huge that no one really
knows what they mean. The $700 billion figure presented to
Congress as a rescue ‘plan’ originally consisted of just two
and a half pages, essentially a ransom note demanding payment
and threatening ruin, and the 700 billion figure was just a
nice round number that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson made
up! First presented to Congress on Monday, the Troubled Asset Relief Program
(TARP) as it's officially called, was rejected, allowing
legislators to balloon the plan to 450 pages and add in
numerous extras, like tax-breaks for stock-car racetrack
owners and makers of wooden arrows [2], so it could be passed on
Friday October 3, 2008. And of course that time gap included a
two-day break for the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashana, because
even amidst the worst economic crisis in modern history we all
know just how very, very important Judaism is to Congress.
Public Pain for Private Gain
The priorities and values of Congress and the
President are clearly on display. Everyone needs certain basic things,
such as clean air and water, employment and adequate
income, safe food, clothing, and housing. These basic
necessities are called ‘public goods’ and no one can function
as a contributing member of society without them. As representatives of
the people that elected them to office, Congress could easily
have taken a populist approach and declared housing a public
good and announced a plan to protect the mortgages of
Americans and to promote affordable housing for the country.
Instead Congress chose to represent the special interests that
pay to get them elected, they chose to bailout the source of
the problem – the banks that tried to make a quick profit by
exploiting the public.
Big business is exactly following the god of
free-market capitalism, Milton Fridman’s mantra,
”So the question is, do corporate
executives, provided they stay within the law, have
responsibilities in their business activities other than to
make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my
answer to that is, no, they do not." Big business may
save themselves in the short-term by trading their trash for
taxpayer cash thanks to a massive Congressional bailout, but
they will wreck the country as a consequence. The national
debt will skyrocket, the US Dollar will be under immense
pressure, and the national credit rating will inevitably
decline.
The federal take-over of the mortgage giants
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae has effectively doubled the
national debt. Even without any ‘rescue’ plan the Treasury is
pumping billions of dollars into the economy in a desperate
attempt to keep it afloat and unfreeze the capital markets.
The Treasury is making short-term loans to the banks at a
frenetic pace, currently averaging $44.5 billion per day!
Yet the interest rate that banks charge each other for short
term loans, measure using LIBOR, is at record levels between
four and six percent.
Instant Poverty’s Gonna Get You (Unless You
Have Gold)
Bank-lending and the credit markets in general
are effectively frozen solid. The only source of any cash is
the Federal government, and they can only spend money as long
as they can sell bonds, otherwise the only option is to print
fantastic amounts of cash and create horrific inflation.
Fortunately for the Treasury, fear in the marketplace is so
pervasive that investors are willing to accept 0% interest on
Treasury bills just to have a safe place to park their money.
Although this makes raising cash easy for the Treasury the
consequence is that the private sector is being starved of
capital. The inability to get loans is rapidly impacting
consumers who want auto loans and mortgages, but also hurting
businesses that require loans to expand or simply to fund
day-to-day operations, like making payroll! This is generating
fear that soon many corporations will either be forced to
declare bankruptcy or fail to pay their employees. At that
point the social contract rips apart as people are working but
not getting paid. All hell will break loose.
California will run out of money to pay state
employees by the end of October. Imagine what kind of
disastrous effect on the economy that will have! The state is
now asking the federal government for $7 billion because they
can’t get a loan! And it’s not just California, many other
states are in serious financial difficulties being caught
between diminishing tax-revenue and escalating expenses at the
beginning of a recession. This difficulty in acquiring
necessary financing is a perfect example of the starvation
effect created by the federal government flooding the market
with their own bonds and crowding out everyone else. The
Treasury is going to flood the world credit market trying to
raise the necessary cash for their trillion-dollar plan.
Since everyone owes everyone else if I
don’t get paid then you won’t get paid, and then
they won’t get paid either … the potential for economic
catastrophe is unlimited, it’s like an economic neutron bomb
burning the establishment down to the root and leaving only a
hollowed-out shell.
Can it Really be Fixed, Saved, or Stopped?
Nothing in this interconnected economic system
is working the way the investors and central bankers intend it
work. There’s no desire to change the world order at the top,
the bankers, the billionaires, the central banks, the
presidents, and the prime ministers, they’re all doing
everything they can to keep the political and economic power
structure exactly the same. And they’ll spend any amount of
national treasure and change any laws in order to do it. They
will disagree on the methods, for instance the temporary
rejection of a $700 billion Wall Street bailout by Congress, but the ultimate aspiration is the same throughout the
lot.
The central-bankers are aware of the severity
of the problem but all of their efforts so far have only met
with failure. There’s no reason for optimism that they can fix
the problem, mainly because there’s simply not enough genuine
capital, like gold or tangible assets, in the system to cover
the debt, and there’s no more confidence in the paper-money
that created the speculative bubble in the first place. The
banks and investment institutions, and everybody else with
billions to invest, are all so fantastically leveraged,
typical ratios of capital to investments are 100 to 1, that in
a situation of declining values they have no choice but to
de-leverage and raise cash. But in order to raise cash and
de-leverage they have to sell their investments and that
depresses the price on the market, driving down the
paper-value of everyone else’s assets! If this process
continues for very long it becomes a self-sustaining collapse
that cannot be stopped. This is the death-spiral of credit
capitalism.
“Is it the end of capitalism?
It seems to say it's a loss of belief in the things we
claimed to have believed in.” - Robert
Brusca, economist
This world economy, operating on the principles
of credit capitalism, is effectively a casino economy that functions
like a con-game – it works just as long as the players believe
in it and feel sure that they can win by playing. When it
turns out the casino is rigged by authorities and when the
whole thing turns out to be just a Ponzi scheme upheld by
shifting around paper without any basis in real wealth, and
then it
crashes. We got to where we are now because too few people
openly criticize the gods whose theory and philosophy
justified it, and too many played along believing they could
win even though they knew it was a scam.
Death of a Belief & the Religion of Money
Fiat currency and the credit capitalism economy
operates on a belief system that’s just as pernicious as any
religion because participants have to believe that it has
value for it to work! You have to believe in what the symbol
of money represents and have faith in the institutions and
people behind it.
"Credit,
by definition, means trust and faith, and for many reasons
trust and faith have been damaged." - Sung Won Sohn, economics
professor at California State University.
This loss of faith has widespread repercussions that are just
now being realized. One casualty is the
‘neo-liberal’ economic model promoted endlessly
in the developing world by New York investment companies,
the IMF, the World Bank, US trade-agreements, and similar
levers of Washington DC power. Both US authority and the
‘neo-liberal’ model have been thoroughly discredited in the
eyes of the world.
The U.S. government's failure to apply rules
that might have prevented the crisis is seen as a betrayal
in many developing countries that faced intense U.S.
pressures to liberalize their economies. In some developing
nations, state enterprises were privatized, currencies were
allowed to float against the U.S. dollar and painful
measures were taken to bring down debts.
[1]
USA gets the Blame
At this point all the fingers of blame are
pointed straight at the United States. The rest of the world
feels that they played by America’s rules and now they will
have to pay for America’s mistakes.
"The whole world has financed
the United States, and I believe that they have a reciprocal
debt with the planet." - Colombian
President Alvaro Uribe
But the criticism from Europe’s deplorable
toadying leaders is thoroughly hypocritical considering that
they didn’t make a peep of complaint when they thought they
could win by playing in America’s global casino economy but
now that they finally wake up and realize they’re all on the
Titanic they start blaming the captain. Nevertheless America’s
golden image is permanently tarnished.
The significance of this slow-motion collapse
is epic, the entire neo-liberal, US Dollar-centered global
economic order, in power since at least 1945, is falling apart
and a very different economic pattern will replace it in the
near future. As the Dollar system collapses so does US
imperial power. Huge turmoil will ensue in the transition
phase because all world trade is currently structured to
circulate through the United States marketplace. Everyone will
have to adjust and it seems likely that the replacement will
feature a multi-polar world composed of regional trade-blocs.
Like a vast forest fire, perhaps a few very
large trees will remain standing, or perhaps they’ll all
collapse into ashes. Whatever the case, the aftermath presents
us with awesome possibilities that were impossible before.
Many noxious weeds will grow in the new clearing, they will
have to be eliminated, but many novel, healthy, and beneficial
forms will also grow to fill the void. Are you ready
for it?
1.
US 'casino' mentality blamed for planet's meltdown, by
Alan Clendenning, AP news, September 30, 2008.
2.
Cost of U.S. Crisis Action Grows, Along With Debt (Update1),
by Matthew Benjamin, Bloomberg News, October 10, 2008.
Part II:
Further
Down the Spiral
10.08.10 Although the original loan terms for bailing
out AIG in mid-September 2008, the world’s largest insurance
company at the time, were a total of $85 billion, AIG has
already burned through that amount and now needs an additional
$37.8 billion of taxpayer funding to prevent bankruptcy. This
perfectly demonstrates the fatal flaw of throwing good money
after bad and the unlimited capital demands that will be
placed upon the national Treasury as the global financial
crisis continues.
At the same time the price for nationalizing
mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac just keeps getting
more expensive, and amazingly both now have to pay more for
loans than they did before the government takeover, effectively
creating higher mortgage rates for home-buyers.
The LIBOR rate, a critical measurement of the
cost of borrowing for banks, has become practically
meaningless because the banks aren’t even lending to each
other anymore! There’s so much fear that the counterparty will
fail that no one wants to risk it and get burned.
“You just don't know whether the person
you're lending to is going to be the guy that has the weak
balance sheet and is going to fall over,'' said Sally Auld,
an interest-rate strategist at JPMorgan Securities Australia
Ltd. in Sydney. “What markets are telling you is that it
doesn't matter what central banks and governments do.''
From: Bloomberg News, October 10, 2008.
And you thought you could retire cashing in
stock?!
As of Thursday Wall Street’s stock collapse has
burned up $8.3 trillion in shareholder wealth during the past
366 days, much of it in just the past week. The worldwide
paper losses are even more fantastic. The US Congressional
budget office has announced that pension plans have lost as
much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months, and after this
week's stock losses the total is undoubtedly much higher. This
means that thousands of American’s won’t be able to retire.
Most American workers don’t even have anything as generous as
a pension plan, merely 401(k) plans or similar stock market
paper that’s now worth less than what they paid to buy it
years ago.
Remember when a billion dollars was a lot of
money?!
The rising cost of borrowing came despite the
Federal Reserve lending a record $420 billion a day to banks
at its discount window in the week to Oct. 8. That was on
top of massive U.S. dollar lending by major central banks
across the globe.
[1]
Wow! $420 billion dollars every day?! If that’s
not a misprint, and the source being Reuters financial news one
would tend to think it isn’t, the amount of money being fed
into the American economy by the Federal Reserve is totally
incredible. The privately operated national debt clock in New
York has already run out of digits, with the national debt
topping $10 trillion dollars. Factor in $420 billion dollars a
day and the national debt is starting to look like an
exponential curve straight up.
The Clock Ticks
I don’t think the world economy can take
another week of massive stock losses. The central bankers have
already fired every bullet in their pistol and now the only
thing left to do is throw their gun at the monster like it’s a
bad Hollywood movie. World leaders will probably declare an
international bank holiday perhaps before, or immediately
after, major bankruptcies cascade through the system. The
fictional wealth has evaporated, trade is dying, lending is
frozen, and soon the lights will go out for everyone. A new
set of economic rules will have to be established but the
United States and England will not have the final say as they
did when the current crumbling order was established at
Bretton Woods in 1944. The rest of the world will demand
consideration of their concerns. The age of U.S. economic
imperialism is over.
1.
TREASURIES-Yields fall on panic flight, easing talk,
Reuters, October 9, 2008.
|
Decision 2008 |
July 2008 |
Officials Indirectly Admit Uncomfortable Truth About HIV/AIDS
HIV/AIDS is a
disease of homosexuals and blacks (those from sub-Saharan Africa
or with that genetic ancestry) and researchers are finally
admitting what has been obvious for decades but too
contradictory to widespread cultural mythology and the belief in
racial equality for them to state in public.
In the first official admission that the
universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids
organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head
of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no
generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population
outside Africa. [1]
Misdirected research
and false statements from officials on the issue of HIV and AIDS
have undoubtedly led to unnecessary deaths, not to mention
unnecessary fear and confusion.
"The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In
the US, the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well
over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the
lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such
differences?" [1]
The answer is obvious but, once again,
officials and fearful researchers are unwilling to state the
uncomfortable facts, for North Dakota’s demographic composition
is almost entirely white (European ancestry) while Washington
DC’s residents are almost entirely black!
In
other news researches using genetic analysis of stored blood
samples have found that AIDS entered the United States via one
individual from Haiti in 1969. Haiti’s population is composed of
blacks, imported as slaves from Africa. 20.07.08
Studies suggest the virus first entered the human population in
about 1930 in central Africa, probably when people slaughtered
infected chimpanzees for meat. AIDS has killed more than 25
million people and about 40 million others are infected with
HIV. [2]
1.
Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over report
admits, by Jeremy Laurance,
June 8, 2008, Independent (UK).
2.
AIDS virus invaded U.S. from Haiti: study,
by Will Dunham, October 29, 2007, Reuters.
Ashes to Ashes, Debt to Debt: The Selling of America
11.07 The massive
investment in U.S. bonds by dollar-rich countries like China,
Japan, and the oil-producing Persian Gulf States, doesn’t make
much economic sense if you just want more money – but it does
make sense if you want to achieve political control through
ownership. The rest of the world is buying America one piece of
debt at a time and the knuckleheads running the U.S. government
keep giving them more Dollars to do it with!
But then Congress
realizes that increasing rates of foreign ownership is making
them look like the corrupt goons that they are and so they raise
a fuss about the fact that the rest of the world is trying to
turn a losing economic investment into a profitable one by
trading green and black toilet paper into something of value,
like profitable U.S. companies. The latest hyperventilation is
over China trying to buy a portion of network technology company
3Com, afraid that China might be able to hack into U.S.
computers or something, like China can’t just buy everything
they want from Cisco systems anyway.
Congress is playing
with fire by antagonizing the very nations that are loaning them
the money they need to pay for their wars on the federal credit
card. Since overseas national investors are now having so much
difficulty getting anything of real value out of the bogus money
they have to take in trade with the USA they are, not
surprisingly, trying to avoid using the U.S. dollar as much as
possible. The U.S. dollar is in a freefall and it’s so serious
that the Canadian dollar is now worth more than the U.S. Dollar!
The dollar faltered Friday
[October 26, 2007]
as oil prices surged to new records over $92 in overnight
trading and gold futures hit their highest price since January
1980.
"There's a call to diversify holdings
from the U.S. dollar," said Woolfolk. Asian central banks and
other large holders of dollars-denominated investments see
gold, a scarce commodity with growing demand, as a good
alternative to the depreciating currency, he said.
Stock prices are
rapidly inflating, commodity prices like oil and gold are
skyrocketing, and it will just continue like this because it’s
all denominated in U.S. Dollars that are shrinking in value and
increasing in supply.
“It's all about money flow. There is
money and lots of it chasing commodities and thus prices are
moving higher.'' - Kyle Cooper, IAF Advisors in
Houston.
Criminally
Incompetent or Just Criminal?
The IED Defeat
project is a beautiful example of everything that is wrong with
Congress and planning by executive authorities in the United
States. For $5 worth of electronics parts and some old bombs,
insurgents in Iraq have demonstrated that they can demolish any
ground vehicle in the U.S. arsenal, the MRAP ‘mine-resistant’
vehicle, and even main battle tanks! So what does Congress do?
Spend billions to build thousands (current orders total 8,800)
of the new ‘mine-resistant’ MRAP vehicles that are only slightly
safer than Humvees but cost about $1,000,000 a piece. If even an
M1 main battle tank can get blown up in Iraq then there’s no
protection and everything is just a wasted effort to prolong a
wasteful conflict. $10 billion has been spent over the past four
years to ‘defeat’ IEDs yet they continue to produce two thirds
of combat casualties. Mission accomplished!
The most generous
way to describe Congress is criminally incompetent, but without
too much effort the case could be made for outright treason. The
President, VP, Congress, Treasury, Federal Reserve, Justice
Department, everything on down is a disaster. Just Alan
Greenspan alone is probably the biggest force of financial
corruption in U.S. history; he makes Charles Ponzi look like a
Boy Scout! The Federal Reserve Chairman is supposed to be an
independent and objective force for carefully managing the
financial integrity of the country but Greenspan didn’t do
anything like that. Instead he worked hand in glove with the
political establishment to fulfill patently political
objectives, abusing the monetary system like it was a giant
campaign donation fund while printing money to bail out the
super-rich that made terrible investment decisions. His policy
of monetary inflation has made the rich richer, the poor poorer
and the economic order far less stable. Following Greenspan’s
disastrous lead, central Banks across the world, fearing the
collapse of their fiat currency scam are in the process of
selling massive hordes of their gold to buy paper currency! If
ever there was an insane investment that would qualify. But they
need to keep the price of gold low in relation to their national
currencies otherwise gold will become an attractive alternative
and they will lose the central bank luxury of printing new cash
at will. So now it’s a race to the bottom in value. Damn right
they’re scared, and even as much as they’re dumping on the world
market the price of gold keeps rising. Confidence is slipping
fast.
In the meantime the
US can keep getting away with it because many foreign nations
are still willing to loan money to the USA, so willing that is
pushes down the interest rate that the US government has to pay
on the debt and the less the bond holders gain in return for
their investment.
OPEC members increased their holdings
of Treasuries 12 percent this year through July to $123.8
billion, Treasury Department data show. The prospect that
OPEC's share of U.S. debt is growing is based on the 31
percent rise in oil since December, which will raise OPEC
revenue 5.1 percent to $635 billion this year and 9.4 percent
to $695 billion in 2008, according to estimates by the U.S.
Department of Energy. [1]
This volume of
purchasing is not about financial return, it’s not a
particularly wise investment at all, but it is about political
power, it is a powerful strategic investment because money buys
influence and ownership confers control. Eventually these
foreign countries will hold so much of America’s loans that the
federal government will have no choice but to concede to the
demands of international creditors – like the IMF and World Bank
in reverse! How’s that for irony?
OPEC has so much influence in the
Treasury market that the 10-year Treasury note had its biggest
decline since June on Sept. 20 after London's Daily Telegraph
newspaper reported that Saudi Arabia may stop linking its
currency to the dollar. [1]
But one thing to
always remember: the dollar market is very liquid and it can
change instantly. These poor-performing petro-dollar bonds can,
will, and are being converted into more profitable assets.
Among foreign holders only Japan,
China and the U.K. own more Treasuries than the 12 members of
OPEC, which supplies more than 40 percent of the world's
crude. [1]
Global
Hyperinflation
All the current
indicator point to the fact that we are in the beginning states
of worldwide currency hyperinflation. China now has $1.4
trillion U.S. Dollars in reserves and they’re accumulating more
so fast they don’t know what to do with it. [2] What happens
when China has 10 trillion dollars, 100 trillion? What happens
when OPEC has 10 trillion dollars in U.S. debt? Where does it
stop? It doesn’t! The irony is that it’s a self-perpetuating
scam. Very few bond producers are big enough to soak up the
massive quantity of dollars in global circulation besides the
U.S. federal government. Most other countries are either too
small or not foolish enough to deficit spend on a huge scale.
The federal government won’t stop spending like crazy as long as
the world keeps funding them at 5% interest. So more and more
dollars flood the world and gold goes to $800 an ounce, 1000,
10,000, 100,000 and so on. Oil 50, 100, 500, 1,000 a barrel, why
not?
Free investment tip: buy precious metals and a wheelbarrow for
your Dollars; actually, better make that a dump truck.
1.
Treasuries Fueled by Petrodollars From Mideast Funds,
by Daniel Kruger, Bloomberg news, October 9, 2007.
2.
China agonizes over its fistful of dollars, by Scott
Zhou, Asia Times, October 26, 2007.
Death of the Dollar,
Rebirth of America
22&23.09.07 The federal government has been
spending far more than it receives in revenue for decades but it
has become appreciably worse since 2001. Under the errant
guidance of President George W. Bush's administration the
federal debt limit has been raised four times and the Treasury
Secretary recently announced that the federal government will be
out of money by October 1, 2007 unless Congress increases the
maximum national debt level again, this time to
$9,820,000,000,000! Obviously that much debt has to be funded by
someone somewhere and since the American public is already in it
deep, and corporate America is built on its own pile of debt,
that only leaves other more fiscally prudent locations overseas
to provide the capital to keep the United States solvent. China
alone now holds an estimated $1.5 trillion in reserves, most of
it in U.S. government bonds. This certainly is an astronomical
amount of money but it’s an absolutely terrible investment
because inflation is rapidly eating away at the value of those
dollars.
|
The
Ten Rules for Members of Congress |
September 2007 |
Uncontrolled Inflation
In 2001 the U.S. national debt was
(only!) about $6.2 trillion and the current maximum limit is
about $9 trillion. That’s $3 trillion new dollars added to the
world economy in just six years. So much new debt so quickly
leads to inflation because more dollars are chasing roughly the
same amount of products and services; prices naturally rise
because they can. This inflation is becoming very serious indeed
but you wouldn’t know it from the official government statistics
because, get this, they have been structured to hide the
inflation! Housing prices have been rapidly rising until just
recently, with price inflation rates of 10-15% a year, or more,
in many places. Are housing prices measured in official
inflation? Nope. Food and fuel are the other obvious inflation
factors with prices rapidly rising for both at an increasing
pace. Are food and fuel part of the official inflation
statistics? Nah, that would look bad, and besides it would cost
the federal treasury a heap of money since every price increase
connected to inflation, like Social Security payments and pay
raises for federal employees, would have to increase
accordingly. Ouch!
|
Ironic Tribute No.73 |
August
2004 |
Inflation is a major headache for
everyone else around the world that has to take dollars in
trade. Since oil is denominated in U.S. dollars the oil
exporting Gulf States have a real problem. More and more dollars
are chasing the same amount of oil so prices naturally rise and
this is largely why the price of crude oil is in record
territory, over $80 per barrel, not so much because of lack of
supply. If OPEC and most every other oil-exporter had a choice
they would switch to the Euro, an appreciating currency, as
standard trade payment for their commodity but the last poor
slob that tried to do that was Saddam’s Iraq, and we all know
what the USA did to him. Since the Gulf States can’t get paid in
a respectable currency they have to convert their mountains of
dollars into real assets, like companies and real-estate, at an
increasingly frenetic pace to try and outrun inflation.
Astonishingly this era of mega-inflation can be traced back to
just one man: Alan Greenspan. During his entire nineteen years
(1987-2006) as Federal Reserve Chairman he doesn’t seem to have
ever missed a chance to expand the money supply. Stock market
investors and Presidents in need of a quick boost during
election season loved his formula of low interest rates and
loads of liquidity. Easy money seemed like a winning formula for
awhile but not anymore.
 Greenspan
is directly responsible for generating the speculative bubbles
that characterize the casino economy of 21st century
international capitalism. Congress also shares much of the blame
for the damaging effects of this loose fiscal policy since they
write the federal checks, even if in practice they usually just
serve as a rubber-stamp for the President. Nonetheless
Greenspan, if he had really been an independent caretaker of
national monetary policy, could have stopped it, or at least
slowed it down.
It’s fairly clear by now that nobody
really wants to trade in U.S. dollars, a currency that is
rapidly losing value, if they can avoid it but switching to a
solid currency, like the Euro, just isn’t that easy. Having
played the game as it is now for 60 years export-oriented
economies have accumulated large reserves, mostly in US
government bonds, and any decline in the U.S. dollar means major
financial losses for the poor suckers stuck holding America’s
debt.
World Order of the
U.S. Dollar: How it Works
The United States has purposely
engineered the world economy to revolve around, guess who? The
USA of course! In this mono-polar economic order the United
States produces the capital (the miracle of the printing press)
and the rest of the world trades it for manufactured products.
The manufacturing countries get jobs, low paying of course but
still employment for restive and large populations, and the U.S.
consumers get loads of cheap junk thereby keeping them
entertained, distracted, and politically neutralized. Having
engineered this mono-polar economic order over the past 60 years
America is, if anything, a victim of their own success having
eliminated all rivals and competition that could have been the
basis of a more equitable, and far more stable, multi-polar
economic trading network, but I digress. It all goes back to the
waning years of World War II when the U.S. conveniently entered
the conflict right when it could win the most at the expense of
everyone else busy fighting an insane war into the
flaming rubble of the bitter end. Germany, Japan, and even
England, were economically ruined; the U.S. rebuilt them as
manufacturing exporters for the U.S. marketplace with all
payments in, you guessed it, U.S. dollars.
With the model in place soon other
nations, like South Korea and Taiwan, fell into line doing the
same thing. The exporting nations were like big fat fish hungry
and desperate for a meal. Some of them took the bait and got
hooked because they didn’t have much choice, like Germany and
Japan, but all of them allowed their economies to be remote
controlled by American planners to suit American needs.
It is true that many of the exporters, particularly the oil
exporting nations, have greatly gained from this system of
Dollar hegemony and the more prudent governments have wisely
invested in strategic development - expanding internal
infrastructure and creating a sustainable post-oil economy. But
we have to remember that for many decades oil and most other
commodity prices were very low, and this is one of the main
reasons why OPEC was formed and why the commodity exporting
countries of Central and South America without a cartel have been desperately
poor for decades despite their resource wealth.
Sure,
the bait tasted great for awhile but now the benefits are
disappearing and they’re left with the hook caught in their
mouth and an uneasy feeling of impending doom if they can't
break free soon. It’s too late for them to change the model and
stop exporting because their economies will collapse and the
only country that has an economy large enough to absorb all
their exports is the USA that wants everything in dollars. But
if the exporters dump the dollar then the USA won’t be able to
buy their exports. The only way for the hooked fish to escape is
to tip America’s boat over and wreck the whole established
economic order, yet that means they would have to totally
rearrange their own economies and risk social turmoil in the
process.
Instability Portends
Change
The pace is quickening and this
financial order will not last very much longer. The US dollar is
falling even faster now because the Federal Reserve has cut
interest rates (September 2007) in order to keep a weakening
economy alive amidst a credit crisis brought on through massive,
widespread debt levels and reckless lending patterns by banks
and other financial institutions. The foreign capital needed to
sustain the U.S. is drying up as low interest rates make it a
less desirable investment destination. Now all the exporting
countries are going to have to lower their own interest rates
too in a race to keep their currency low compared to the dollar
so they can keep selling stuff to Americans. This is the reason
behind the absurdity of Europe wanting a weak currency even
though they have, horror of horrors, a fairly strong and well managed
economy that pushes up the value of the Euro. It doesn’t make
sense that the European Union and the other major economies,
like Japan, don’t want what they should want: a strong currency
that indicates a strong economy. Instead they all want a weak
currency because they want to sell cheap stuff that American
consumers can afford to purchase with their depreciating
dollars.
This pattern will eventually lead to
the collapse of the US dollar as it hyper-inflates away into
oblivion and America drowns in debt, unable to pay for
increasingly expensive imported merchandise. Capitalism is
unlikely to fundamentally change due to this new situation but
the flow of capital and the overall trading pattern will.
America will finally have to rebuild its own manufacturing base
that has been eviscerated and shipped overseas and worldwide economic
events will compel a genuine change of government within the
United States, indeed even a revolution. The
world will finally switch to a multi-polar trading pattern, a
more normal state of events with more equitable trade of capital
and products between states. But this can’t happen until the US
dollar, the dominant currency of the world, can no longer ruin
all rivals. Everything America does, like invade Iraq or bomb
Afghanistan, follows from that economic hegemony. The USA has
the most to lose and they will fight to the bitter end to
destroy all economic rivals. It may get ugly: a desperate empire
is a dangerous empire.
Nonetheless, behind the smoke and
beyond the turmoil the future never looked brighter. We are
likely to witness the most significant politico-economic shift
in power of the last 100 years. Mao once said that political
power grows from the barrel of a gun; America’s power grows from
the almighty dollar. Over the past 100 years we’ve progressed
from a world order based on intimidation and fear through
violence into a world based on subterfuge and coercion through
capital. Once the Dollar Empire is dead we will be able to
progress beyond both into a more rational age where interactions
are more transparent and equitable; a new era where no
one entity can dominate everyone else.
|
Or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Iran |
September 2007 |
A-Bomb So Nice They
Dropped it Twice
04.08.07 We are often told, and It's
generally believed in America, that the two atomic bombs dropped on
Imperial Japan in August 1945 were necessary to end World War II
and to secure U.S. victory. This widely accepted narrative
survives today because it is repeated over and over, not because
it's historically accurate. An excellent article written on
this important aspect of American (and world) history is titled
‘The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb
and the Apocalyptic Narrative’, by Peter J. Kuznick.
The military victors establish the
official history concerning what happens during wars, and we have
to remember that when we read the narrative on any major
historical event. So, although it's also true that Imperial
Japan was a vicious war machine that brutality subjugated and
enslaved everyone in their path, and it seems completely logical
to assume that if Japan had atomic weapons they would have had
no qualms in using them, the atomic bombing of Japan is not
supposed to have been an act of revenge. Instead the standard
narrative claims the bombing was done out of military necessity
in order to force Japan’s leaders to surrender and to save
American lives by obviating the need to invade that nation.
|
The three largest massacres of innocent
people in a single-day have all been performed by the
United States' war-machine:
1.
The firebombing of Tokyo, March 9, 1945. As
many as 120,000 civilians were burned alive or suffocated
in the inferno.
2.
The atomic-bombing of Hiroshima Japan on
August 6, 1945 instantly incinerated 70,000, and
eventually killed up to 200,000.
3.
The atomic-bombing of Nagasaki Japan on
August 9, 1945 instantly killed 40,000. |
In fact the U.S. government did not
have to use the atom bombs on Japan in World War II and doing so
served no significant military objective. By 1945 Japan’s
imminent defeat was painfully obvious to Japan’s wartime
leaders. Before the atomic attacks America had been fire-bombing
cities across Japan for months, wreaking fantastic devastation
and loss of human life, and two atom bombs was not going to
alter the outcome of a war where defeat for Japan was clearly
inevitable.
General Douglas MacArthur told former
President Herbert Hoover that, if Truman had acted upon
Hoover’s May 30, 1945 memo and changed the surrender terms,
the war would have ended months earlier. “That the Japanese
would have accepted it and gladly,” he averred, “I have no
doubt.” Hoover believed the Japanese would have negotiated as
early as February.
Using the atom bombs did not make
Japan sign a peace deal any faster than they were going to
anyway, and did not save any American lives as is often claimed.
Top U.S. military leaders recognized
Japan’s growing desperation, prompting several to later insist
that the use of atomic bombs was not needed to secure victory.
Those who believed that dropping atomic bombs on Japan was
morally repugnant and/or militarily unnecessary included
Admiral William Leahy, General Dwight Eisenhower, General
Douglas MacArthur, General Curtis LeMay, General Henry Arnold,
Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, Admiral Ernest King, General
Carl Spaatz, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Admiral William
“Bull” Halsey.
The U.S. government didn’t just
attack military targets in Japan using the atomic bombs, they
intentionally used them on populated areas to test the
psychological and physical effects on the civilian population!
Brigadier General Carter Clarke, who
was in charge of preparing MAGIC summaries in 1945, later
stated, “we brought them down to an abject surrender through
accelerated sinking of their merchant marine and hunger alone,
and when we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need
to do it, and they knew we knew we didn’t need to do it, we
used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.” ...
Admiral William Leahy angrily told an
interviewer in 1949 that although Truman told him they would
“only…hit military objectives….they went ahead and killed as
many women and children as they could which was just what they
wanted all the time.”
Admiral Leahy, President Truman’s
personal chief of staff, stated:
“It is my opinion that the use of
this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no
material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese
were already defeated and ready to surrender. ... My own
feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted
an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark
Ages.”
Eisenhower was equally appalled,
writing in his 1963 Mandate for Change that when he learned
from Stimson at Potsdam that use of the bomb was imminent, “I
voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my
belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the
bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I
thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion
by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no
longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was
my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some
way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’” ...
Other military leaders drew similar
conclusions about the imminence of Japanese surrender without
use of atomic bombs. Air Force Chief of Staff General Henry
Arnold wrote, “it always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or
no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of
collapse.” General Curtis LeMay argued that his conventional
bombing had already ended the war: “Even without the atomic
bomb and the Russian entry into the war, Japan would have
surrendered in two weeks.” Brigadier General Bonner Fellers
wrote shortly after VJ day: “Neither the atomic bombing nor
the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s
unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either of
these events took place.” ...
Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph
Bard, the Navy representative to the Interim Committee,
recommended, before leaving the government on July 1, that the
U.S. not use the bombs without warning given the clear
evidence that Japan was already militarily defeated and trying
to surrender and the devastating blow that would be struck by
the Soviet declaration of war. Such considerations led Admiral
Leahy to conclude that an invasion would not have been
necessary. Leahy explained, “I was unable to see any
justification, from a national-defense point of view, for an
invasion of an already thoroughly defeated Japan.”
Dropping the first atomic weapons in
combat was a decision that carried enormous significance on
multiple levels yet President Harry Truman was such a vacuous
warmonger that he ignored the advice of his experts and Generals
and ordered the attacks without even giving it a second thought!
No wonder George W, Bush admires Truman so much.
Having already incinerated
millions in firebombing campaigns over cities in Europe and
Japan Truman probably figured adding a few hundred thousand more
to the pile wasn’t going to make any difference, as far as he was
concerned anyway. Josef Stalin encapsulated this line of
reasoning when he said, ‘the death of one is a tragedy, the
death of millions a statistic.’
Not only did Truman rely on fervent
proponents of using the bomb, he ignored the entreaties of
Stimson, State Department Japan expert and former Ambassador
Joseph Grew, Admiral William Leahy, Secretary of the Navy
James Forrestal, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, and
other knowledgeable insiders who urged him to change the
surrender terms and inform the Japanese that they could keep
the emperor. Indeed, this is precisely what the U.S.
ultimately did—but only after dropping the two atomic bombs in
the US arsenal. Several
scholars have argued that such modifications of surrender
terms could have significantly expedited Japanese surrender,
saving numerous Japanese and American lives, and obviating use
of the bombs, especially if combined with announcement of the
impending Soviet declaration of war, a development that
Japanese leaders dreaded. …
On his way back from Potsdam aboard
the USS Augusta, Truman received news that the city of
Hiroshima had been virtually wiped off the map. He proclaimed
that “This is the greatest thing in history!” There is little
evidence that, despite his statements indicating awareness of
the forces he had unleashed, he ever gave the bomb decision
the serious thought it deserved. In 1946, when MGM sent him a
copy of the script of its upcoming docudrama about the
production and use of the bomb, The Beginning or the End, for
his approval, Truman voiced no objection to the scene where he
decides to drop the bomb. It was only the insistence of Walter
Lippmann, who during a subsequent screening found the
president’s flip decision “shocking,” that stirred the White
House to request changes. The original version appears to have
been more authentic. When an interviewer asked Truman whether
the decision was morally difficult to make, he responded,
“Hell no, I made it like that,” snapping his fingers. In fact,
Truman never publicly acknowledged doubts or misgivings. When
Edward R. Murrow asked him in a 1958 interview if he had any
regrets about using the bomb or about any of his other
presidential decisions, Truman responded, “Not the
slightest--not the slightest in the world.”
People like Truman are still in
charge of the show sixty years later so it’s no wonder America’s
absolutely futile war on Iraq has been grinding on for almost
five years now with no end, or victory, in sight. Democrat or
Republican if they have the power these 'public servants' will
use it, and not use it wisely but abuse it to the fullest extent
possible. Probably the only reason that nuclear weapons were not
used in combat during the Cold War was because the top
leaderships realized that to do so would negatively impact upon
their own personal lifestyles – they would be living in an
underground bunker eating cans of Spam for the rest of their
lives! Top authorities used nuclear weapons in every other way
they could get away with.
“Again and again, generally in secret
from the American public, U.S. nuclear weapons have been used,
for quite different purposes: in the precise way that a gun is
used when you point it at someone’s head in a direct
confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled.” - Daniel
Ellsberg
The atomic attacks on Japan make very little sense militarily,
but from a geopolitical perspective it seems likely that the Truman
administration
intended to scare Stalin and deter the Soviet Union from further
military aggression after Germany and Japan were crushed, as
historian Gore Vidal maintains. But in fact this plan backfired
badly for the United States and the entire world because it
ushered in a new and highly unstable era threatening the entire
planet with nuclear annihilation. Simply testing the atomic bomb
in public was entirely sufficient to demonstrate this new
destructive capacity to the USSR, but by dropping not just one
but two atomic bombs on a defeated wartime victim Truman
demonstrated that the United States' political leadership was
not just willing but eager to use nuclear weapons! The
real message was obvious to Stalin: get your own atom bombs as
fast as you can. Far from securing an American victory Truman’s
order to strike Japan with atomic weapons was the starter pistol
for the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
|
The
Greatest Game Show on Earth! |
April 2007 |
18.02.07
The United States was established as a Republic
to be defended by a citizen militia - never by a permanently
staffed career army. That was the idea behind the National
Guard, probably the only military force in the United States
that has any Constitutional legitimacy, a part-time citizen
militia that is under the control of the State governors and
only placed under the control of the President during a national
crisis. The reasoning against a full-time military should be
clear by now: a standing military is an open invitation for wars
of imperial aggression and conflicts for profit and it will
eventually lead to a dictatorial president and corrupt Congress.
And that’s exactly what the United States has today.
This all started because of World War II,
specifically the fact that the soldiers were not completely
demobilized at the end of the conflict as they had been after
previous wars. This standing army obviously needed something to
do to justify a continued existence hence the Korean War, then
Vietnam, and so on. At least during these conflicts most of the
soldiers were drafted into service and that put a brake on how
far the Executive branch of government could drag the American
people along in war. Vietnam changed that. Widespread public
resistance to a horribly brutal and futile conflict forced a
shattered Army with its prestige in tatters to rebuild as an all
volunteer force. By only employing volunteers the U.S. military
removed the last resistance factor to opportunistic warfare, and
today the military is just a mercenary corps that refers to the
President as their Commander in Chief and will salute and shoot
at whatever he tells them to kill as long as their paychecks
keep coming. Anyone that doesn’t agree with this
situation will leave and be replaced by someone that doesn’t
think as much and is more willing to follow orders without
asking questions.
America and Israel: Locked in a Spiral of Self-Destruction
22.07.06
The official
U.S. government accounting office estimates the latest total expense
for the ‘War on Terrorism’ is now up to
$430 billion. What do we have to show for it? Well folks I’m
pleased to announce that your tax dollars have been hard at work
and now we are just days away from finally defeating all those
evil terrorists that hate freedom, peace, long walks on the
beach, cute little fuzzy animals, and want to kill all your
loved ones too. Terrorism won’t be interrupting your
television-viewing schedule anymore because America has won! But
first America just needs a few more dollars, so keep
those pledges coming and we’ll beat those bastards once and for
all, yes, just a few more of them to assassinate and blow up
with high explosives and then terrorism will vanish forever…
At the same time
another report is released from the Federal Reserve that paints
a convincing portrait of
America bankrupt. So it seems America, under the prudent
fiscal guidance of the unsuccessful businessman named George W.
Bush, is in a race to try and defeat terrorism before it goes
belly up financially. Brilliant.
Israel is
continually touted as a beacon of hope, freedom, democracy and
capitalist opportunity in the Middle East. So, some people in
Israel have enough sense to recognize the foolishness of their
government's current policies and attempt to try some of the
freedom and democracy by
staging a protest in support of peace, then the police move
in to break it up. Where’s the democracy here? Where are the
alternative voices to more war and more invasions? From the look
of it they’re in jail or In front of a judge trying to explain
their attempt to use the democracy they supposedly have.
Back in heartland
American, replete with all its wisdom and unselfish
understanding of world affairs, many Americans glued to the tube
wonder aloud at the foolishness of Hezbollah for inciting the
wrath of Israel, but who’s really crazy? At least Hezbollah has
a plan, Israel just reacts in a blind rage while repeating the
same policies from the past forty years that have consistently
failed. So they invade Lebanon and occupy the southern strip,
how is this different than the 1980s? How is the outcome going
to be more favorable to Israel this time? It’s just more of the
same, occupying land illegally and creating more enemies to
Israel. Crush, kill, occupy, assassinate, oppress: repeat as
needed. What of the Golan Heights? What about the spreading
illegal settlements in the West Bank? Now that doesn't factor
in?!
According to this logic Israel must occupy all of the
Middle East from the border of Austria to India and then they'll
have a safe buffer zone and no one will be able to harm them.
Maybe it’s past time to stop trying to kill neighbors and to
finally realize that the only way peace can be achieved for
Israel is to try and live with them instead of dropping bombs on
their heads?
The state of Israel
is the little terrorist that never grew up. They're a country
that was
founded using terrorist tactics against the pre-existing
Arab population and has now acquired massive militarily power,
yet Israel still behaves as if it operated from a position of
fundamental weakness. This is why they conduct terrorist actions
that are so sleazy not even their opponents follow, such as
assassinating leaders using bombs from warplanes, missiles from
helicopter gunships, and spies delivering poison, or using
collective punishment and terror tactics on entire populations
like bombing the power plant in Gaza or flying
warplanes at supersonic speeds back and forth over the occupied
territories to psychologically assault the people struggling to
survive below.
Of course you won’t
get the information that's really important from CNN or Fox
news, they won’t deliver any factual history to establish
context for the public to objectively judge current events. All
they deliver are rehashed propaganda statements from official
outlets, death toll figures, and echo chamber commentary from
pseudo-experts on the payroll. Isn’t it amazing that the
historical memory of so many American’s only extends back to the
latest action on the part of the Palestinians, Hezbollah, or
Iran thus neatly making Israel always the innocent party? This
fractional reasoning is so absurd it can only be the product of
a massive campaign of biased rhetoric. Even a cursory overview
of historical events clearly shows both sides guilty of
intransigence, but even then the power balance in this conflict
is totally disproportion in favor of Israel. Israel has the
money, Israel has the political influence, and Israel is
bristling with every kind of modern weapon imaginable. The onus
of responsibility is on Israel's shoulders, not rag-tag bands of
rebels like Hamas in Gaza that have been marginalized and
pounded into the rubble.
Israel likes to
think of itself as the smartest guy in the neighborhood but
their policies make the Soviet Empire look subtle and nuanced in
comparison! If the Israeli leadership were in charge of the USSR
they wouldn’t just roll the tanks into Prague they’d bomb the
hell out of Czechoslovakia! This isn’t a smart country, this is
a country pushed from the bottom by a public scared out
of their minds while being dragged from the top by a political
leadership that consists of fools of supreme magnitude, and
Generals that have a pathological obsession with revenge and the size of
their guns.
“Hezbollah started
it”
Hezbollah may have
triggered the latest battle by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers
but they sure didn’t start the war, regardless, pinning all the
blame on Hezbollah is completely disingenuous.
 And
of course Hezbollah in Lebanon is just a little puppet
controlled by the evil big daddy Iran. It’s just
inconceivable that Hezbollah is actually a popular
indigenous movement in Lebanon that fills a vacuum for social
services that are not being met by anyone else in the region.
Yeah right, so hey, invading Lebanon to attack a supposed
extension of Iran, that’s not a pretext or anything to
expand the war against Iran and Syria like the kidnapping of the
Israeli soldiers was a
pretext to start a war on Lebanon. Sure Israeli soldiers
have been seized before and the Israeli government hasn’t had
any trouble bargaining for their release back then, but now
things are different, now a golden opportunity for military
adventurism exists and the IDF, in unholy conjunction with the
new political leadership in Israel, would simply be remiss in
their exploitative duties if they passed this one up.
The truth is that
Hezbollah was founded in direct
response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon back in 1982.
 If
Israel hadn’t blown Lebanon to hell, sponsored their civil war
and invaded that sovereign country then Hezbollah would never
have had the justification to form in the first place. How many
new Hezbollah’s will spawn as a result of Israel’s current
assault? Hezbollah fills a desperate need of Shiite Muslims in
Lebanon for basic social services and community defense. The
fact that they're politically militant and well organized is
just a reflection of a survival tactic for a people under siege.
Groups under attack look for friends and allies wherever they
can find them and if Iran and Syria want to help then why would
they turn that down?
An Israel that attacks Lebanon will only
enhance the solidarity of not just Shiite Muslims, but also Sunni
Muslims everywhere, in their resistance to the gross imbalance of
force between Israel and neighboring nations. That’s part of the
plan that Hezbollah has in play. They know that Israel will run
amok in Lebanon,
killing innocent non-combatants and destroying civilian
infrastructure in an
orgy of war crimes. Even granting that Israel has the right
to defend itself that doesn't mean they have license to go 'apeshit'
and slaughter everyone in sight. An irrational and
disproportionate military response plays directly into the hands
of Israel's opponents. Israel on the rampage is its own worst
enemy.
 The
second goal in Hezbollah’s strategy is to form a unified front
with Palestinian resistance groups, specifically Hamas. Even
though Hamas is Sunni Muslim, by operating a two front conflict
it begins to strain the capacity of the IDF. The third goal is
to unambiguously demonstrate to the people of Lebanon which side
the Bush administration is really on. Does America really
support the new independent and sovereign Lebanon or do they
actually support Israel, and everything the State Department has
done to help Lebanon reform its government is just a sham? The
answer is clear. The Lebanese government pleaded for world
assistance to stop Israel as they tore apart the country but
Bush instead used all his political muscle to
block any effort to stop, or even slow down, Israel’s military
operation. Indeed, what does 'democracy' really mean coming
from the Bush administration?
Washington in particular makes cynical claim to be concerned
with preserving the democratic government of Lebanon against
those who seek its destruction. Hezbollah is, in fact, part of
that government. It is Lebanon’s largest single political party
with mass support amongst the Shia population that predominates
in the south. It has two government ministers, and 23 MPs who
are part of a 35-strong opposition grouping. As well as its
parliamentary presence, Hezbollah runs a range of social
services, including hospitals and schools, on which hundreds of
thousands rely.
The forces that are actually seeking to topple a democratically
elected government are not to be found in Damascus and Tehran,
but in Washington, Tel Aviv and London. These are the real
architects of an illegal war of aggression to bring about regime
change.
The Bush administration has given Israel carte blanche to
perpetrate war crimes, even when the lives of its own citizens
are threatened. This is the clear implication of the remarks by
US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, when asked to comment on
the deaths of eight Canadian citizens in an Israeli air strike
July 16.
-
Chris Marsden for WSWS July 22, 2006.
Hezbollah has shown
Lebanon, and others, that the one true allegiance of the
American government is to Israel, and no one should be fooled
into believing otherwise. In fact, the Bush administration is so
totally allied with Israel that they're willing turn
on a dime and sacrifice the compliant Lebanese government they
helped build, and to
sacrifice every other relationship America has on the world
stage!
"Everywhere the Bush administration is being less attended to.
Everywhere, others are sharpening their knives, loading their
weapons, and preparing to smite their enemies, inspired by the
US example, liberated by its failure." -
Tom Engelhardt, July 18, 2006
The deleterious
consequences of America’s blind and foolish allegiance to
Israel, at the expense of everyone else, cannot be understated.
International support for the United States is at a breaking
point and soon it could become an avalanche as everyone from
Turkey to South Korea bail out on the relationship entirely,
recognizing the rapidly decline in US influence on world events
while keenly aware of the rising domestic pressure driving them
away from the unilateral policies of the Bush administration and
its unquestioning support for the brutality of Israel’s military
machine run amok. Supporting the United States as a problematic
and mercurial ally just isn’t worth it anymore, and once one
leaves the rest will follow.
The fourth goal of
Hezbollah is to split the Muslim public away from the highly
oppressive police state regimes in power over them in countries
such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. These countries have
governments that are being sponsored and protected by the
American government, and by extension Israel too, and hold
policies that are very unpopular on the street. America’s highly
unpopular and bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq has,
metaphorically, thrown gasoline all over the Middle East and now
all Hezbollah has to do is light the match and throw.
Watch the demonstrations and protests carefully; they will
indicate the severity of the unrest and the stability, or lack
of it, that these regimes have in controlling their restive
populations. What happens when the dam breaks?
This is a major
conflict with widespread ramifications and it appears certain to
spread further before it's over. The
war plan (suicide pact would be a more apt description)
devised and
promoted by war hawks and Zionist Neocons is already known,
and it
points towards an attack on Syria and Iran too. The
propaganda campaign to mold public opinion in support of this is
nothing short of relentless. But just because these people
get their war doesn’t mean they will win it. Israel has
repeatedly demonstrated an inability to adapt to changing
circumstances, unlike the smaller and more nimble resistance
groups such as Hezbollah. Iran and especially
Syria have actually demonstrated some savvy decision-making in
the recent past, and even though they are comparatively weak
in a military sense, success
or failure in this conflict doesn’t hinge upon military
superiority, as events in Iraq and Afghanistan have clearly
shown.
Who’s Really in
Charge Here?
The issue of which
party is really in charge becomes unavoidable at this point. Is
it the United States that calls the shots, or is it Israel?
Perhaps it doesn’t even matter anymore since the two countries
are so closely intertwined, but nevertheless one of the most
revealing factors is the fact that America has multiple levers
of influence it can use to limit Israel’s behavior yet the
American government consistently refuses to use any of them, even
after Israel conducts the most egregious actions that directly
damage the interests and values of America.
Let’s start with the
cash. Israel is the largest recipient of United States foreign
aid. Just the
grants to Israel now total some 2.3 billion dollars a year,
not to mention the loans and weapons deals. Israel uses cutting
edge weaponry, primarily supplied by the United States, and such
weapons sales (or donations) stipulate that the weapons can only
be used in cases of clear self-defense and internal security.
The assault on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure, from power
plants to bridges, is in an unambiguous contravention of this
agreement. What happens as a consequence? Nothing. It’s
difficult to even argue that the military contractors that make
the equipment given to Israel are making money off the deal
because Israel is notorious for reverse-engineering and
reselling American weapons technology.
'So What?!'
In less than six
years the Bush administration, and the swarm of flies that hover
around and feed off of it, have managed to flush America down
the toilet. They have abrogated and trashed major defense and
security treaties, sent wasteful and foolish spending through
the roof, sent political corruption to record levels, while
intentionally undermining the crucial system of checks and
balances on Executive authority. Even more insidious and
directly harmful to you the American reader, they have steadily eroded
America’s competitive advantages all the while actively working
to manipulate and distort the information the public learns so
as to deceive them about what's really occurring!
America is rapidly
falling behind other countries in things as diverse as broadband
Internet access, modern steel production, and cutting edge
biotech research. So much federal money has been diverted to
supporting the military industrial complex that just about
everything else has been neglected. And the technology and
brainpower that America does develop gets shipped off to foreign
countries for them to develop, market and profit from.
Yes, while people
are watching the fireworks display on TV a major geopolitical
shift in gravity is occurring and the majority of American’s
could not be less aware of what's really going on. There’s no
better example of how the American public is treated like a farm
of mushrooms kept in the dark and fed a steady diet of shit by
the mass media and the political leadership class, than the
profound events going on in Asia, specially the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO). You will search long and hard to
find any mention of the SCO in the domestic American media but
when you read material from overseas you will find out that it
is a very important cooperative organization on economic and
political issues between Russia, China and central Asian
countries with many more eager to join. Just recently they setup
a deal to run a
natural gas pipeline through Iran and Pakistan to India and
eventually to China. Did you read about that before?
Russia and China are
getting richer by the day thanks to high oil and natural gas
prices and factory production; they're smart, organized, and
they don’t act brash or try and fool themselves or anyone else.
What a concept.
'Everybody Hates
Hezbollah'
24.07.06 It recently leaked
out that the Bush administration was in the process of
fulfilling an urgent
request from Israel for more bombs. What's that sound? It
must be Osama bin Laden roaring with laughter! He couldn't pray
for a better ally supporting his cause than the one he has in
President George W. Bush. This President has handed bin Laden
everything he wanted on a silver platter and now it’s time for
the coup de grace: a rush shipment of American made bombs sent
special delivery to Israel so they can kill more Lebanese!
From now on every
war crime and atrocity Israel commits, every infant killed as
'collateral damage', every apartment complex that is demolished,
it will all be synonymous with the United States. Israel may as
well just paint the stars and stripes on their bombs and drop
leaflets that read: ‘Carnage courtesy of the people of the
United States’. The cat is out of the bag this time; no longer
can America pose as an impartial third party and convince anyone
but Americans. This kind of announcement will undercut American
influence around the world, but most notably it will make Iraq
even more dangerous for American soldiers and it will erode
the already weak ally, Karzai, in charge over Afghanistan. The
direct and overt support of Israel in its effort to attack an
Arab nation, regardless of the official pretext, undercuts every
other Arab government on the American payroll, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, now they have lost a significant amount of
public respect because of their association with America.
Is this ‘mission
accomplished’ or what?
Israel has bombed a
milk production factory and a Procter & Gamble distribution
warehouse, as well as telecommunications towers, according to
the Wall Street Journal newspaper, and of course just
about every other element of Lebanon’s civil infrastructure.
“Israel is committing serious crimes
against humanity. They are fragmenting the country piece by
piece.” - Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.
Here are some
numbers for context: the number of Lebanese killed by Israel so
far totals 380. The IDF claims it has killed 100 Hezbollah
members. So according to the official figures that makes
380-100=280 innocent casualties in Lebanon. What about Israel?
Hezbollah’s rockets have killed 17 Israeli civilians and 19
soldiers have died in combat. Meanwhile, the World Health
Organization estimates that 600,000 Lebanese have been displaced
by the conflict. Lebanon’s Minister for
transport and public works, Mohammad Safadi, estimates that
Israel has damaged 80% of his countries major highways and 95%
of the bridges. The cost of rebuilding will total many billions
of dollars. Who will pay for this?
A fair fight this is
not, yet the symbol of injustice that this represents only
serves to perpetuate and inflame the wider conflict, ultimately
strengthening groups like Hezbollah. Also ironic is that in
their zeal for unilateral action based on threats, intimidation
and direct military force, the Bush administration has severed
every avenue of dialogue with the parties that actually have
influence over Shiite Hezbollah, namely Syria and Iran. All they can do
is make ineffectual demands against the Sunni governments of Saudi
Arabia and Egypt to influence Hezbollah to disarm!
Why take sides in
a foreign conflict?
Why are people like
Dick Cheney and George Bush so enamored with the blunt
application of raw military force? Why are they so enthralled
with military states like Israel? Vice President Cheney went so
far as to take ownership of Israel’s assault using
the pretext of neutralizing Hezbollah as further justification
for his grand ‘War on Terrorism’. "It's
going to be a battle that will last for a very long time. It is
absolutely essential that we stay the course.''
These people are the
supreme authoritarians, the respect raw force more than anything
else. They see life as a boxing match and they want to be on the
side of the winner. Life is actually more like a chess match but
chess requires planning and deep thinking and it’s just so much
easier to shoot off your gun and pretend you know what you're
doing. This is why they never learned the lessons from the
Vietnam fiasco because they cannot let go of the belief that
superior military might always wins the battle. They just cannot
fathom that America lost in Southeast Asia despite having the
biggest and best weapons. So to this day they still blame
everyone that doesn’t deserve it, they blame the media for
losing the war, they blame the war protestors, they blame the
warfare doctrine, they blame the Soviet Union and China, they
even blame the Vietnamese!
Everyone else from
Machiavelli to Mao figured it out long ago: military
superiority does not necessarily create political victory,
but these authoritarians are dense as two planks so they keep
repeating the same mistakes and everyone else has to suffer for
it.
We need more chess
players and fewer boxers making the decisions.
|
Precision Strike |
![[Israel's] Precision Strike 000601569c000](sml/precision_strike_sml.jpg)
July 2006 |
03.08.06
It’s too early to tell exactly how the conflict between Israel
and Hezbollah will turn out but one thing is already clear: the
world order is ever more rapidly tumbling farther from
equilibrium. It also seems increasingly apparent that the
minimal gains Israel can extract from their conflict are
miniscule in comparison to the dangers that will emerge from
their intentional destabilization of the situation. The
parallels to George Bush’s military adventurism in Iraq are
inescapable. Lebanon is to Israel what Iraq is to the United
States: quagmire and comeuppance. Both foolish wars were
fomented by the same delusions driving similar maniacs; they
dig their own grave while convincing themselves they are
searching for gold.
The shrieking mantra of these authoritarians is ‘victory through
torture and success through superior brutality’. The false
success of their method is already self-evident but they will
not stop until a resistance movement of sufficient strength
forces them to stop. In the meantime the United States, Israel,
and every country that decides to hitch to it is part of a
speeding passenger train headed for cliff. America and Israel
will take everyone on board over the edge.
"I have two sons and I will allow none
of my children to serve in the United States Military. If you
join the military now you are not defending the United States
of America. You are helping certain policymakers pursue and
imperial agenda." - Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (USAF
Ret.) ~2005
The U$ military should be abolished and dismantled before it is
too late, if it isn’t already, because it has become just a tool
for the blunt expression of Executive power. America was
intended to be a Republic not an Empire, just as it was designed
to only have a citizen militia, never a standing Army!
Wanted: America’s
new Public Enemy #1. Must be able to incite hate and elicit fear
in populace.
08.06.06
On
June 8, 2006 the Bush administration announced they had
successfully killed public enemy number one,
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
near Baghdad Iraq using two 500lb bombs delivered
via F-16.
Zarqawi had practically every bombing and
nefarious deed in Iraq pinned on him by the Bush administration,
and the Pentagon even admitted they had intentionally
exaggerated the threat in a calculated propaganda
effort. Now that he's out of the picture, assuming his death
isn’t just more Pentagon propaganda, then a new public enemy
number one will have to be concocted since Osama bin Laden is,
apparently, not important anymore.
So despite the barely concealed excitement in the
rhetoric from the Bush administration’s mouthpieces and the
American media outlets, the outcome is unlikely to slow the pace
of killing and insurgent attacks in Iraq or elsewhere. Is the
war over now? Can all the troops finally come home?! Yeah right.
 What
has the killing of Zarqawi really changed?! Has either side lost
the desire to continue the conflict? Hardly. Iraq now holds the
distinction of being the most violent place on the planet.
Zarqawi had a frenetic run and it’s surprising
how long he did last against the most powerful military empire
in history, but his days were clearly numbered. Besides the
multiple death sentences charged against him, from the Jordanian
government for instance, Zarqawi had managed to alienate, or
kill, nearly every potential ally in the region from tribal
leaders to Shiite and even Sunni Iraqis with his ultra-violent
tactics and singular and exclusionary version of Islamic law.
Nonetheless he did not seem to lack for weapons, tactical
allies, foot soldiers and suicide martyrs to conduct his
campaign against the occupational regime in Iraq and the
coalition military forces operating there.
Zarqawi knew the rules of the game he was playing. He was living
by the sword and was undoubtedly aware that he would eventually
die by it, yet others just like him are more than willing to
take his place.
Many American’s probably aren’t aware of the massive effort that
went into this operation. Thousands of people toiling for years,
millions of collective hours, while burning through billions of
dollars - all that effort just to find and assassinate one man!
Something is seriously wrong with the United States, the
national leadership isn’t even just treating the symptoms by
attacking terrorism, now they’re an active participant in the
sickness. The Bush administration is trying to use terrorism to
defeat terrorism!
So considering
the enormous resources required to kill just one threat, imagine
what will be required when it’s not just one Zarqawi in a small
region of a small country in a far corner of the planet, but
ten Zarqawi’s all over the world. This is where we are
headed because as long as persistent injustice and pervasive
violence are prevalent terrorism will follow when people are
given no other option to resolve their grievances.
Approving the President
03.03.06
The latest polls on President Bush’s public
approval rating are illuminating in more than one way. Scandal
after scandal and
Bush’s approval rate is now at a record low of 34%. This in
itself is newsworthy but a comparison is even more informative
for Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal in
1974, just before he resigned, had a 27.5% approval rating!
Think about what that means for a moment. Everything Richard
Nixon did to America, from bombing Cambodia and lying about it
to breaking and entering for burglary, and he still had over a
quarter of America standing behind him in approval!
Apparently the President of the United States can
get away with doing just about anything and a significant
portion of the American public will still approve of it simply
because of his mystical title. Apparently the American public,
or a large portion of it, would even salute and support Mickey
Mouse if he wore a designer suit with an executive style
haircut, just as long as he has the holy title of ‘President of
the United States’; that and he wears the little US flag pin on
his suit. Definitely this is something to consider the next time
you hear the term ‘executive privilege’. Should we be giving
these people any more privileges to abuse than they already
have?!
Iran: Another war from the peace Presidents
03.01.06 & 12.02.06 Can you hear the
sounds? The staccato of industry at work, jet engines revving up
at the end of the tarmac, and jingoistic war rhetoric heating up
the airwaves. It’s getting louder and closer. High-explosive
care packages courtesy of hard-working patriotic Americans
toiling away day after day in some bleak Midwestern town with
one Wal*Mart and one bomb factory, keeping American safe from
terrorists, bad guys, GI Joe villains, and all the President’s
enemies.
Here it comes. Get
ready for another great big fuck you painted up in the
red-white-and-blue, falling from the sky from a B-52
… but the only color that reaches the ground is bright crimson.
I vividly remember
watching the storm brewing over Kosovo, another ‘peace’
president 'forced' to go to war against a tiny impoverished
nation somewhere out there on that big colorful world map. In
rolls the propaganda, public enemy number one is
Slobodan Milosevic, play the
ominous music, push the hate buttons, beat the drums, watch the
bombs fall.
The air-war over
Kosovo didn’t solve anything, in case you were wondering. The
Balkans are still a mess riven by ethnic and religious
hostilities, but much like beating a hornet nest with a stick,
now it’s an angry mess. It was really all about the
resuscitation of NATO as a force extension of the Pentagon,
removing a recalcitrant local authority from office, America and
NATO getting their dirty meat hooks into the Balkans for basing
purposes, and especially about the economic exploitation and
subjugation, of Eastern Europe for private gain. The war against
Serbia and Kosovo had nothing to do with human rights and
democracy, and even if it did the organized crime, human
trafficking, and illegal drug problems (mostly ignored by the
mass media) that emerged and spread out of the turmoil and
damage of that conflict has completely negated the supposed
benefits of the military assault in the first place. See also:
Just Say No to NATO. Bill
Clinton, Madeleine Albright, General Wesley Clark and the rest
of the gang would have used any excuse they could come up with
just so they could sell their war to the world long enough to
get what they, and their backers, really wanted. And isn’t it
amazing how enlightened those people become when it’s a
different war being pushed by the opposing political party?
The Kosovo conflict
was an incredible eye-opener to me because it so clearly
demonstrated that Presidents, Congress and the doctors of
America’s special-interest driven foreign-policy will wrap
anything in the flag to get the war they want, when and where
they want it, and even worse, the American public will
invariably roll over, give a vacuously crisp salute, and even
re-elect the same criminals. In fact, close scrutiny of events in that
foolish and disingenuous war motivated me to create this Holology
production that you're reading
now.
 Fast-forward to Iraq, with just
enough gap in time between the last military conflict to wipe
the memory banks of the ever-gullible American public and ready
them for another fiasco of foreign policy. This time public
enemy number one is Saddam Hussein, he has all kinds of terrible
weapons of mass destruction, even a nuclear weapons program, and
he’s coming to get you America! Be afraid! Drop the bombs, go in
and take over the country, mission accomplished. Now Iraqis love
Israel, they're solid supporters of the new American imperial
world order, and the best part is all their oil wealth has paid
for the entire adventure so the American taxpayer hasn’t had to
pitch in a dime! Haha!
So when the storm of
high-explosive munitions fall all over Iran just remember, as
Bush said, it’s not the Iranians he has a problem with just the
evil regime in power over them. So keep that in mind Iran when
your power goes out, your roof caves in and you’re out of a job.
Don’t blame George W. Bush or America, blame your leaders for
having a military and trying to defend the sovereign rights of
your nation against a massive, hypocritical foreign aggressor.
Iran is doomed no
matter what they do because the situation has been framed as
another guilty-until-proven-innocent show-trial just like the
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that Saddam Hussein was
supposed to have crammed into every mosque and coat-closet all
over Iraq and had to immediately give up in order to rejoin the
world community. But of course he couldn’t oblige the West and
give up his secret weapons programs because he didn’t have
any – and that was exactly the idea. Iran is the same story
repeated, the names change but the trick is the same – prove
your innocence or we'll preemptively attack you. Never mind
that Iran has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has
every right to establish a nuclear power program, never mind
that India has not signed the NPT and already has
nuclear weapons with a will to use them but nonetheless the
Bush administration is stumbling over each other to sell nuclear
parts and technology to them!
Just ignore the fact
that the Iranians are already marginalized, under sanctions, and practically under
siege with American forces having invaded countries on both
sides of them, Afghanistan and Iraq. And although rarely
reported in the western media, another recent arrival armed with
probably hundreds of nuclear warheads, wants them wiped off the
map too - the Zionist state of Israel.
Never mind that
suspicion is hardly grounds for incrimination, unless you're
Iran and then the rules change anyway. Never mind that the
latest document the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is
harping on that supposedly proves, obviously, without a doubt,
is simply
that the Iranians must be building nuclear bombs because they
possess a document that shows how to build a nuclear bomb.
Even though
the
CIA delivered these documents to them six years ago in a
(supposedly) botched operation! Just ignore that this could all
be a giant clandestine setup operation against Iran.
No, just focus down
on the fear – what if those Iranians, under siege,
constantly threatened and surrounded by very hostile and potent
military forces, what if those guys in Iran got a nuclear weapon
(too), why the whole universe could collapse – it’s just that
serious! Don’t entertain the notion that joining the nuclear
club could make Iran a more sober and stable country; let’s just
make Iran prove its innocence.
Do you dare to
contradict the official orthodoxy? And what is a little pissant
like you going to do about it? Are you going to try and see
things from the other side’s perspective too and actually put
the events into an objective context? Get real! That would be
like supporting the enemy and it's downright un-American to think
independently! Why don’t you just shut up, keep waving the flag
and go back to your minimum-wage job that doesn’t even keep pace
with inflation, let the defense contractors and oil industry
continue to pull down record multi-billion dollar quarterly
profits that dwarf what most countries earn in an entire year
and allow the smarter people in power to get on with their jobs
because they know more than you do.
 Oh
and they sure did know so much more than everyone else about
Vietnam, that’s why it was such a raging success; remember
that little ‘police action’?
Recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
reports on the war in Southeast Asia reveal it all. The discrepancy between what the
intelligence analysts were reporting about actual events on
the ground in Vietnam and what consecutive Presidential
administrations were telling the public is stunning.
Americans for some reason continue to believe that their
Presidents may lie about a sex scandal or about raising
taxes but they have trouble accepting that their Presidents
will lie to them about something as deadly serious as a war.
Yet they do lie about war and Bush is just the latest one to
get away with it. A
leaked memo lends support to the already fairly obvious
conclusion that George W. Bush was going to have a war on
Iraq regardless of what UN inspectors found or didn’t find,
regardless of international law or acceptable standards of
national behavior or public protests or anything else. So
much for democratic input.
The latest tactical
brilliance and strategic stupidity coming from the Pentagon is
to convert some of the nuclear tipped ballistic missiles to
conventional warheads and then create a rapid reaction force,
called
Prompt Global Strike that can hit any place on the
planet in 30 minutes or less. And since this is the Pentagon
doing the delivery your $500 pizza won’t be free if it
takes a little longer. They’re still trying to figure out what
happens if someone like Russia perceives that non-nuclear warhead
streaking into the central Asia ‘threat zone’ as a nuclear
attack, because there’s no way to tell the difference until
impact, and launches a nuclear response on the United States
before their missile bases are wiped out. Details, details,
nothing a few billion dollars can’t complicate.
This all part of the
plan to keep competition down everywhere in the world,
just in case it might actually become a minor nuisance to the
unbridled and nearly unlimited military might of the American
empire, you know, sometime in the distant future. Rumor has it
that CHINA is actually spending more money on its
decrepit 1950s military; yeah they could be a threat, a SCARY
threat. Too bad they don’t have that half a trillion dollars
that the Pentagon has to play with every year.
Doesn't it seem
peculiar that despite a rising defense budget and billions spent
on a global war on terror, neither the United States nor the
world is becoming any safer? And in fact if you listen to an
authority like Vice President Dick Cheney a major attack on
America could come at any moment! Oh and by the way,
President Bush needs Congress to sign the next
120 billion dollar war check because, you know, if it isn't
approved the terrorists will win.
So maybe you aren't
worried about Iran or any other nation on the Bush
administrations hit list since it's probably all too far away
for the blowback to negatively impact your lifestyle ... for
now. But really, remember that those bombs may be falling far
away now but they're getting closer all the time, and no
matter who you are or where you live they'll reach your home
eventually, because with a President that can do anything he
wants, from authorizing illegal secret domestic eavesdropping to
preemptive aggression on any country anywhere, anytime, without
warning in thirty minutes or less, all of his choosing while
getting (literally) blank checks from Congress, no one is safe.
When certain people have this kind of unquestioned,
unchallenged, deadly authority, everyone is in danger.
A Racial Hurricane
Hurricane Katrina will undoubtedly go
down on record as the worst natural disaster in American
history. Current estimates run all the way up to $100 billion
dollars to rebuild and repair the damage and the loss of life
anywhere from a few thousand to 10,000.
 Disasters
have a way of testing the mettle of a country and the stamina
and resolve of the people as well as the true values and
priorities. In this regard the devastated aftermath of hurricane
Katrina is, among other things, a startling example of the
severe divisions, internal problems and a widespread crisis of
priorities that plague the United States in the 21st century.
Even though a mandatory evacuation
order was issued, thousands of residents remained in the path of
the storm. For the most part the people left in New Orleans were
those incapable of taking care of themselves either because of
age, physical disability, or simply severe economic
disadvantage. These people depend on government aid, even in the
best of conditions, just to keep their heads above water. And now they've lost their sole provider
of support and have literally gone underwater. Why were they
left behind? Why didn’t authorities make an effort to evacuate
them?
The sad truth is that no one really wants these people for in a
modern technological society they're completely redundant,
lacking any skills, or in many cases, even the capacity to learn
and perform a task of economic benefit. They rely on subsidies,
donations, private and public aid in order to survive. New
Orleans looks like Sierra Leone Africa because that is
effectively what it has become demographically and economically!
With the rise of capital over labor, money is currently the
defining metric of all utility values. Within this economic
system without money you're considered nearly worthless,
and without the capacity to earn or acquire money you are
considered
worthless.
 These people suffer from a multitude of problems,
some a result of historical and economic forces beyond their
control. "Many people didn't have
the financial means to get out. That's a crime and people are
angry about it." - Alan
LeBreton, 41, from the hurricane devastated city of Biloxi
Mississippi. “Class divisions,
which often fall along racial lines in this once-segregated
southern state, are not new to Mississippi. It traditionally is
one of the poorest states in the United States.”
[2] A
large-scale operation for evacuation could have been staged
before the hurricane hit and moved everyone out on buses, but it
wasn’t done.
But many problems are the result of
personal actions. Read the news stories and you’ll encounter
descriptions of the refugees remaining in flooded New Orleans as
having 5, 7, even 11 children. Language indicates a noticeable
lack of education and a strong reliance on religion as an
all-encompassing descriptive tool for interacting with the
people and events around them. The Deep South is characterized
by a religious, primarily Christian, fatalistic and disempowered
view of events. This thinking goes: if a hurricane strikes and
kills you there’s nothing you can do because it's God’s will,
so why leave? Why prepare or do anything to protect your family?
 A
key biological element is involved in this issue as well, one
that many Americans go to extraordinary lengths to mask and
ignore. Nearly all of these people are black. The racial
dimension of the disaster is easily apparent through the
television images being beamed to people around the world, even
if the domestic audience would rather not contemplate it or the
obvious connections it brings to the fore.
“New Orleans ranks fifth in the United
States in terms of African American population and 67 percent of
the city's residents are black.” [1] In order to
understand what this really means we have to go to the source,
race starts in biology but ends in
the mind, meaning it's a socio-biological element.
During the Colonial era of American
history slaves were imported to perform very labor intensive,
primarily agricultural work, such as cotton harvesting. These
slaves were taken from many locations but mostly from West
Africa and Europe. The white slaves from very poor European
countries, such as Ireland, naturally and relatively easily
integrated into the main body of American society but the
African slaves were always in a separate class. Even early in
America’s history the social and economic consequences of
massive (forced) immigration became obvious to the leadership
class. The country of Liberia on the West African coast was
intentionally created as a destination for the repatriation of
African slaves. Liberia’s capital is named Monrovia after
President James Monroe and the flag is a duplicate of the United
States but with only one star.
Although many black slaves and former
slaves were repatriated, the overall plan ran into various
political and economic obstacles and most remained in the
general region where they were first sent, the southeast corner
of the United States. World War II and the immediate aftermath
changed the stagnant situation to some extent offering new jobs
and opportunities in the north central and northeast rust belt
industrial locations, and eventually throughout the country as
civil rights laws were enacted. The most recent demographic
trends have actually seen a reversal of this, with black
African-Americans moving back into the South.
 The South has built a stable social
order based on racial separation; whites live in one
section and the blacks live in another. Things have been this
way for so long in the southeast quarter of the United States
that people on both sides of the racial divide see it as
entirely normal and even desirable. Hurricane Katrina revealed
this racial divide to the world, the whites left New Orleans
while the blacks stayed behind and essentially took over,
subsequently looting about everything they can in order to
obtain near-term survival but without any regard for longer term
consequences.
Because the plutocratic order in
America never really changed any, the same process that created
the African-American demographic situation is occurring again,
this time with Mexican laborers. Industrialists, large, medium
and even small businesses are indirectly and directly sponsoring
or importing Mexican labor in order to cut costs and increase
profit margins. Construction and agribusiness are two of the
biggest sources of this practice. They hire illegal labor
because they know those workers are deathly afraid of getting
caught by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) so
they can manipulate that fear to pay these disposable workers
below minimum wage, in cash, off the books and without the
proper state and federal taxes on any of it. These labor
practices are a modern form of slavery in everything but name,
even though the workers get paid they are still economically
destitute and live on an unstable societal fringe with virtually
no legal rights. This emphasizes that slavery in America has not been about racism
but about financial gain.
Americans tend to think of racial
discord in terms of black and white but in actuality the
conflict is more complex. Since Mexican immigrants and
African-Americans compete at the same class level for economic
opportunities, significant and growing friction occurs between
the two racial groups as they vie for a completely inadequate
supply of jobs.
Racial conflict and
disparity is hardly a new concern and in fact it occurs
throughout the world, but within this issue are some peculiar
consistencies. Go anywhere in the
world and you’ll discover that regardless of history, culture or
political order, the lighter the skin tone the more successful
the individual is, meaning the higher they reside in social
status ranking.
 And
this holds true even when the rules are changed, just as long as
they are consistently enforced. Not only that but the greater
the degree of racial diversity in the society, the greater this
rule of skin color division is manifest; the more the racial
differences are apparent, the more desirable lighter skin tone
becomes. Look at the leaders of these multi-racial countries,
the generals, the CEOs and the presidents who represent the
authority leadership ideal; even the supermodels that represent
the beauty ideal. Look at their skin color as compared to the
majority of their representative populations. More often than
not if they didn’t speak the local language fluently you’d think
they were from Europe!
In a multi-racial country, such as those throughout South
America, which ones consistently rise to the top of the status
ranking? What do they look like? What's really going on here?
Someone has to explain why certain groups consistently fall to
the bottom of the social hierarchy and others move to the top.
This stark phenomenon of differentiation screams out for an
explanation. Typically the excuse for this effect of racial
gradation is institutional racism, but if this is true then it
seems to be ubiquitous in both time and space. But regardless of
the label or excuse used to force reality into conformity with
moral assumptions, this racial phenomenon is so universal it has
to be coming from something on a very primal, basic, fundamental
level, it has to be biological.
Research has indicated that
racism is instinctive because it's human nature to want to be
with others that are similar and to avoid those that are
different; like kinds seek the company of other like kind over
that of outsiders, strangers and those that look and act
differently. [6] But just
because something is instinctive that doesn’t mean we have to
behave that way, especially when a clear reward counteracts that
instinct. Even if people are inherently racist, financial gain
nearly always triumphs over racism and especially so in
capitalistic societies that revolve around the accumulation of
money. Someone has to explain the racial gradation that
continually occurs even in merit-based societies such as those
in the western hemisphere where financial profit is the primary
measurement of human value. If you want to make money you don’t
get concerned with a person's race, you get concerned with their
performance.
Those that have
tried to defy the principle of racial gradation have paid dearly
for it. For an example study the country of Zimbabwe, formerly
referred to as Rhodesia in honor of Cecil Rhodes. Under the
despotic racial guidance of leader Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe
decided that the European settlers who founded the country in
its modern form and continued to farm in small numbers, had to
leave. Mugabe wanted the land to give to his Zanu-PF political
party supporters, to use this as a very crude tool to boost his
support base and to undermine his opponents. Over a period of
many years this policy has resulted in the expulsion of most of
the whites from the country. The problem for Zimbabwe is that
nearly all of the agricultural productivity was a result of the
white farmers and their African employees. Further compounding
the crisis is the fact that the beneficiaries of Mugabe’s
land-transference policy are not farmers. Consequently
unemployment has massively increased while productivity has
crashed and Zimbabwe is in an economic free-fall headed for rock
bottom as fast as it can go.
The country has gone from being the wealthiest on
the continent (along with South Africa) as Rhodesia, to just
another hopeless African charity case as Zimbabwe.
What Zimbabweans are discovering is that the white man was
actually the better of the evils, so to speak, because in their
wake Chinese and Indians have moved in for the kill and shown
themselves to be far more predatory and capital-hungry than any
of the white farmers because, unlike them, they don’t live in
the country and couldn’t care less about the fickle locals so
long as they can turn a profit.
Racism can be found in all races, but that doesn’t mean it has to be
punitive because just like any other instinct, such as
sex-drive, it has to be moderated through self-control in order
to achieve any semblance of social stability. The first step is
to recognize it for what it is and not to live in fantasies
and force specific behavior with lies, myths and taboos.
Different people can live together but they can only coexist if
they clearly understand each other, and especially themselves.
How different are
we?
The differences between groups of
people, between species of animals and especially the
differences between animals and humans, have been based on
perceptions, beliefs and other long-held notions but only very
recently have any of these views been put to the test. Actually
testing and measuring the variation between and within animal
species has yielded some very surprising and fascinating
results.
It was always
considered fact that only humans possessed characteristics such
as language and culture, culture being learned traits passed on
from one generation to the next. It was once thought that only
humans could make and use tools, and then researchers checked
into it and found that to be quite untrue. Then it was said only
humans had language, but a few careful studies later found many
animals can use language too. The next unassailable division
became the amorphous concept of culture. Well it turns out that
several animal species have been found to have culture too such
as chimpanzees and even killer whales! [5]
Even within sheep studies have found
wide differences in intelligence, even a specific gene that
makes one smart and the other not. [3] At this point we
have really run out of valid exceptions with which to separate
humans from animals and the only real difference is a matter of
degree – human are only more intelligent and adept at
tool manipulation than other animal species.
So if animals can have culture and
about every other trait once thought to be peculiar to humans,
then humans aren’t special creations but rather just another
animal on the chain of development, no more or less important
than others except for the greater power. It seems our
real problem is one of perceptions and an inability to properly
rank capacities because we have invented a fictitious barrier
between what we consider to be special and human and the rest of
the biomass on planet Earth that many seem to think we're
magically divorced from, that humanity didn’t evolve and develop
in the exact same manner as every other species.
But the process of correcting
erroneous thinking need not stop there. Brave skeptics can go
much farther for if the difference between the animal kingdom
and man is merely shades of gray and not black and white then we
must also recognize that the human species is not a monolithic
construction as assumed but itself consists of a gradient of
development. Indeed, why do we continue to believe ourselves the
exceptions to evolutionary factors? Our own species is evolving
and differentiating under pressures and where differences
exist discrimination becomes obligatory.
Differences do exist within the human
species, very significant ones in fact. Every day DNA is used to
identify people and in fact this science has become so finely
honed that it can even tell what a person looks like. Police
investigators with the help of scientists can now determine
racial traits using nothing but DNA! [4] Doctors must know all
about race or risk killing the patient in
cases of blood transfusion, organ transfer and many other
medical procedures. Pharmaceutical companies are currently
working on new drugs that specifically target human racial
traits in order to make medicine more effective.
Revolution in
Totality
These major differences are far more
than skin deep as anyone can plainly see, yet too few try
because the consequences of accepting racial reality are so
serious that they threaten to totally overturn all of our
traditional beliefs and conceptions concerning humanity,
morality, ethics and indeed our entire worldview. Reality doesn’t care about your personal moral views or
anyone else’s, it just keeps on doing the same thing regardless
of what anyone wants to believe. The only equality that can
actually be achieved is legal equality. We can be the same under
the law but anything beyond that is purely fictional. We can,
and should, give every citizen an equal foundation of standard
education and opportunities, but we shouldn’t expect everyone to
succeed in equal measure. We need a system that can properly
deal with the people of widely differing abilities with fair opportunity and a
value system for discrimination rooted in facts, not
unfounded beliefs and wishful thinking. Until we have this,
racial disparity and conflict will continue to be an element of
severe contention throughout the world. 04.09.05, race:wealth
chart added 01.09.06
1.World
stunned as US struggles with Katrina, Reuters, September
2, 2005.
2. Anger
rises among Mississippi's poor after Katrina, by Paul Simao, Reuters, August 31, 2005.
3. Sheep
have 'smart gene, by Vera Devai, New Zealand Herald,
September 3, 2005
4. DNA
tests offer clues to suspect's race, by Richard Willing,
USA TODAY, August 17, 2005
5. Killer
whales learn to gull a gull, AFP, August 24, 2005
6. Study:
Race fears linger like dread of snakes, by Michael Schirber, MSNBC, July 28, 2005
The state prison acts as the low-income mental
health facility of the current age, and in that capacity it is
even less successful at illness mitigation and rehabilitation
than previous attempts.
Trapped in the Web of its own Creation
12.11.04
Obviously there are many things about America
that can serve as a platform for discussion such as a stagnant
economy, the fall TV series lineup, or even the recent elections
wherein slightly over 50 percent of the American voters gave the
world the middle finger - displaying their usual tactful
brilliance. But why do they hates us?!
Yet nothing has
quite the imperative qualities of a big flamin' war, even if it
is thousands of miles away from the sponsoring country’s
citizens. So what is going on in Iraq right now as in
who's winning? Here’s a hint: it's not the US of A.
Now I have a few
simple questions to ask about the current attack on the Iraqi
city of Fallujah and they aren’t meant to be rhetorical. Really,
does anyone know the answers?
-
Why are American
military forces invading (again ,,, and again) Fallujah?
-
How is victory going to
be defined in this operation?
-
Why are the Marines dong this job, a typical Army task?
-
Just for the sake of
debate - what if this invasion doesn’t help?
The interesting
thing about the assault on Fallujah is that this operation can’t
be just for domestic consumption because the national election
is over. In other words this invasion of Fallujah
 must
be a genuine military operation for pacifying the Iraqi
populace; now we should ask why it's necessary? Whatever the
case it’s apparent that the invasion is operating on the same
false assumptions that drive the rest of the War on Terrorism (WOT)
namely that a fixed number of malcontents are trying to defeat
American operations and if they can just be killed then
everything will go swimmingly, but this only demonstrates a
complete inability to grasp the nature of a dynamic situation
for the very action of trying to defeat 'bad guys' creates new
ones and justifies the position of the surviving ones!
It's been asserted
more than once that the American military does not learn from
its mistakes even though they analyze the hell out of all of
‘em. Who really wants to read some West Point graduate students
multi-volume dissertation anyway? In all fairness it may well be
that the military is continually getting placed in predicaments
by policy-makers that have no politically feasible solution.
And just as in South East Asia decades ago - every action that
is allowed only makes the situation worse. That and the
majority of the military have had their critical faculties
removed through a carefully orchestrated program of obedience
training - don't ask questions just follow orders. But anyway,
I'll leave that debate for the West Pointers. Fact of the matter
is that the only way to win in Iraq is to leave, but that's not
an option because it would make the Bush administration,
still in power, look bad. Bush would have to admit he made a
monumental mistake and even worse that he continually lied about
it all. Bottom line: fat chance, many more Marines and a hell of
a lot of Iraqis are going to die before Big Chief
stay-the-course ever admits fault.
But hey, don’t worry
about it, President Bush isn’t. Dead bodies aren’t a problem -
just wrap them in the flag and the critics shut-up. Besides, no
matter what the actual outcome of the street battles in Iraq it
will be reported as a victory for U$ forces and nobody is
keeping track of the costs except Usama bin Laden or UBL (you
know you’ve hit the big-time when you get your own acronym).
Yeah, remember that guy? Turns out he’s still out there cruising
around in his SUV with a BUSH/CHENEY bumper-sticker somewhere in an
undisclosed location. Americans may not know the real score but UBL does and he knows exactly what’s going on -
he’s bleeding America dry of
the precious green and black circulatory fluid that sustains
it. The Pentagon calls that ‘asymmetrical warfare’ but the White
House calls it ‘reelection strategy’.
The fundamental issue is that America is trapped in a paradox of
hypocrisy for it is a nation built on codified freedoms yet at
the same time it has become a continent-straddling Empire that
must continually employ brutal force to gain and control the
resources necessary to sustain that very Empire. This is the
schizophrenia that divides the United States – is it a Republic
founded on a Constitution of liberty or an Empire predicated
upon worldwide oppression and coercion? Does America conquer and
subjugate or does it share and cooperate? Both options are open
but only one will work for long.
Any bets?
America Can Win in Iraq (but not with bullets)
10.09.04
America fought a
long and brutal conflict in Vietnam decades ago yet still
debate the basic question: why did we lose? Typically the
political left argues that it was an immoral war while the
political right claims it was flawed tactics and equipment
coupled with malicious media manipulation of public opinion. And
this is why America is in another Vietnam right now because they
still can’t collectively answer a simple question with a simple
answer! How can a war be won when in the process of killing one
enemy your violence makes two more?
America
loses because it fights to kill an enemy when it really needs to
win a friend.
An optimistic assessment of the situation concludes that Iraq is
not a total loss to America just yet but the window of
opportunity is rapidly closing forever. This is how America
wins Iraq: stop worrying about the rebels because they're
only empowered by tactical strikes and violent reaction. Take a
town that has a neutral or positive sentiment towards Americans,
assuming one can be found anymore, hold a town meeting and then
do everything that the public wants – fix the schools, repair
the roads, pay the police salaries, arrest the thieves, do
everything 110% for this town for as long as it takes. If
the rebels attack, shoot back but don’t pursue – all military
strategy must maintain a defensive posture never offensive
against a guerrilla force. In short order the town will love
Americans, they will tell their relatives in the next town and
they'll want the Americans to come to them and do the same
thing. With one town employed, safe and a happy they can easily
defend themselves against the rebels and then America has
a new ally. One town down, 1,000 more to go and America is one
step closer to total victory.
The
Sunk Cost of Invading Iraq
18.04.04 Starting two major
wars concurrently, Afghanistan and Iraq (and almost in the
Philippines!) while steadfastly refusing to consider the views
and concerns of the world community at the same time, will
surely go down as the height of arrogance and political
over-confidence. Regardless, W Bush will always have his
personal victory over Saddam Hussein, that and the sheer
ambition of his foreign policy failures!
In the meantime the
mantra of the moment is plain to hear: ‘American credibility is
on the line’, ‘we can’t cut and run’, ‘we can’t leave Iraq like
we did Vietnam’, or as the President repeats endlessly like a
talking doll with a pull-string ‘we have to stay the
course’
[M]y message today to those in Iraq is
we'll stay the course. We'll complete the job. My message to
our troops is we'll stay the course and complete the job and
you'll have what you need. President George W. Bush,
News Conference, April 13, 2004.
 Any
time I hear a phrase like that played over and over it tells me
that the persons parroting it are desperately trying to convince
themselves when they have a disconcerting fear that the
opposite is probably true. And if this is the course America
must stay on then America is in for a long and very brutal
conflict in Iraq. For now Bush’s war in Iraq, the ‘course’ we
all must 'stay on', has achieved at least one notable milestone
– the unification of previously divided groups be they Kurd,
Sunni or Shiite - against American occupation. The war of
liberation from Saddam’s despotism has been effectively turned
into a war of national independence for Iraqis - empowering the
radicals and de-legitimizing dialogue and cooperation with the
American powers.
There’s a term in
economics called ‘sunk costs’; a sunk cost is payment that can’t
be returned, for instance if you buy a movie ticket and start
watching the movie only to discover it’s a terrible film, you're better off to leave the theater and do something more
valuable with your time than to stay because the ticket is a
sunk cost. Yet by staying you make it worse by wasting your time
too. Logically, investors are supposed to ignore the pull of
sunk costs gone bad when making decisions and walk away,
otherwise the investor risks further losses unrelated to the
initial investment.
 The
point is that even if America’s credibility is on the line over
Iraq it’s still true that the smartest thing to do is to ignore
the sunk loss and leave before it gets worse. The challenge is
to identify the point where staying is worse than just packing
up and leaving and admitting a mistake. I think America has
already reached this point, evident by the fact that the
Executive branch and much of the American public must convince
itself of the righteousness and viability of the cause despite
the mounting evidence to the contrary. Especially when
mouthpieces like Donald Rumsfeld end up as a parody of the Iraqi
propaganda ministry – denying the obvious and spinning the
rhetoric ever faster as the conflict on the ground in Iraq falls
out of control.
|
It's wise to remember that, just as the American and
French involvement in Vietnam demonstrated, military
superiority does not necessarily create political victory. |
No one likes to
admit mistakes, especially with as much invested in them as the
President has, but arrogance has no place in a situation like
the conflict in Iraq where men and women are dying every day
with increasing frequency because of it.
Importing the Destitute
09.01.04 The Bush
administrations planned changes in immigration policy started
out as a thinly disguised
election year ploy to grab the
rapidly expanding Hispanic vote, but where the public opinion
has been drawn on this contentious issue has turned it into
something more enlightening.
The simplest way to
gain a competitive advantage in pricing is to cut labor costs
and the typical way to do this is to exploit the destitute of
the world for cheap labor. Now, I’ve written about the
secret of cheap
labor before but what happens when your company
has to operate in a specific location and you can’t offshore
or outsource your workers? This is the problem faced by sectors
such as agri-business, retail and services. CEO's and other
business planners have figured out the way to do it is to simply
import the destitute of the world into the country, then use
immigration law to hold these serfs in a perpetual state of
poverty and desperation so they don’t demand higher pay. This is
exactly what the latest Bush administration immigration plan
does.
So who endorses the
Bush plan on immigration? Corporate
commercial interests that’s
who, mostly agri-business and service sector. Who doesn’t like
the proposed immigration changes? Many
Hispanic groups! This is
because they’ve realized the changes don’t offer them anything
new, it essentially allows them into the United States to slave
away for an American company and then kicks them out when their
work is done; the Bush plan confers no rights to the immigrants
and no responsibility for the companies exploiting them.
I think we know now
which side the Bush administration is working for – and whom
they are desperately seeking to exploit just long enough to get
elected again. So these proposed changes in immigration policy
are not going to be very popular with the vast majority of the
public. Thus Bush & Associates have to use the hard sell to ram
it past the public barricades and into the law books. One of the
most frequent (but also the weakest) reason that business
interests love to use in this game of promoting indentured
servitude immigration is that ‘American’s won’t do these types
of jobs’ and thus importing the destitute from south of the
border is the only solution. What the business interests are
really saying here, when they demand more immigrants to fill jobs
'Americans won't take is, we demand to get away with paying
such paltry wages that no American can possibly afford to take
our jobs and survive. What really happens is that illegal or
semi-legal aliens are forced into taking minimum or below
minimum wage jobs in dangerous and unpleasant work settings
because they have no other options! This is ridiculous, this is
Rush Limbaugh reasoning – it only appears to work if you say it
loud enough and repeat it over and over. I simply cannot accept
that someone from Mexico would rather scrub toilets or pluck
chickens than an American if given a legitimate opportunity to do
something else.
|
President Calvin
Coolidge once said, “the chief
business of America is business." Coolidge was
stumbling to express the outdated philosophy that Bush &
Associates, just as many political conservatives before
them, still operate under – ‘whatever is good for business
is good for America’.
Stand back while I explode this fallacy with one word:
offshoring. |
Indeed, how can
anyone live on a
minimum wage job, even with
benefits? Minimum wage at the time of writing is
$5.15 an hour,
although it can be even
less through various exceptions. Some states have enacted a
higher minimum wage than the federal minimum.
Only with the assistance of government assistance and charity groups,
that’s how people survive on minimum wage! It takes food stamps, free clinics and the whole
panoply of social welfare to survive on minimum wage jobs, so
business paying these low wages are in effect getting the
government to subsidize their labor costs. Many of these
social assistance programs have been devolved to the states from
the federal level, a move promoted by the Republican right but
enacted by the Clinton administration. And this burden on the
states is partly why so many of them have budgets in a state of
crisis.
Further, large-scale unskilled and uneducated
immigration, mostly from Mexico and Central America, is rapidly
eroding the government funded educational system as well, hence
the other crisis sweeping the nation - education. This is
because many new immigrants don’t speak English well or at all,
they often are in poor health, they're disadvantaged in
multiple ways and it's the government’s responsibility to
rectify all of these deficiencies during school-age years. The
cost to do this is staggering and exacerbated by changing
demographics and the tax structure. Basically the people with
money don’t have kids and the people with kids don’t have money.
Now The Bush
administration has doubly screwed the schools over with his
No Child Left Behind initiative that ties federal funding of
schools to meeting specific achievement levels set by the feds.
Lofty standards are great but Bush & Associates are unwilling or
unable to provide the massive funding needed to meet them when
coupled with the large-scale uneducated immigration occurring
simultaneously. This is clearly a recipe for disaster.
The solution is
actually less complex than the problem but getting it enacted is
the challenge. It’s fairly obvious by now that taxing business
to support social welfare programs doesn’t work because the
companies will either pass the costs on to the consumer or pack
up and leave. The real ‘answer’ is to not have to pay for social
welfare to begin with, to have a populace that has the
intelligence, education and capacity to support themselves and a
wide selection of employment opportunities to achieve a state of
well being. But while we wait for utopia to arrive the practical
solution is to always connect the consequence to the action,
we’ve got to connect responsibility for the social outcome to
the source. In this case it means making business’ responsible
for the welfare of their employees.
Now it would seem to
only make sense that a healthy and happy worker would be a
greater asset to an employer than a sick and uneducated one, but
in this age of the disposable worker, common sense is in short
supply in America. Obviously business’ don’t want any
regulations placed upon them, they want to buy whatever they
want and fire whoever they want but it's nonetheless true that
it was regulations that created the structured environment that
allowed them to get started in the first place and government is
the only bully big enough to put any pressure on corporate
interests to act in a socially responsible manner.
Firstly the public
has to be fairly and accurately informed, and then they have to
exert pressure on their representative government to protect
them from predatory business practices and the continued
exploitation of labor. If government won’t protect its own
citizens or address these problems then it’s not doing its job.
Saddam's Capture: Closure or Continuance?
14.12.03 The capture of
Saddam is definitely a political victory for Bush but just below
the convenient sound bite and pre-fabricated speeches sloshes a
vast sea of hypocrisy. For instance, on December 13, 2003 a
sarcastic President Bush said
"International Law?! I better call my lawyer." Yet
the very next day when Saddam’s capture was announced, what’s
all the talk about? A trial under international law!
International law is employed when it serves an election agenda
and denigrated when it doesn't.
A cure worse than
the disease?
The Allied (meaning
American and British) assault on Iraq, between two Gulf Wars and
a decade of crippling sanctions, has likely killed enough Iraqis
to compare with what Saddam himself did, minus the bloody and
pointless Iran-Iraq war. In fact, civilian deaths in Iraq due
to ongoing military operations are not even being recorded
anymore! The mounting body count is politically embarrassing;
solution – stop counting! [1] What does this tell us? And at
least Saddam's administration had a process, a 'justice' system
such as it was, instead of simply random slaughter from cluster
bombs, botched raids, mistaken targeting, etc. Many of the
people Saddam executed would have been considered criminals
under most any other justice system as well. My point is that
the killings of Saddam Hussein are hyped up for the consumption
of the American electorate and to drown out Allied
responsibility.
The very busy group
Human Rights Watch recently released a damning report on
the flawed military strategy employed in Iraq [2] including
targeted killing of leaders (assassinations), all of which
failed, plus the use of cluster munitions which kill
indiscriminately or just sit around and act as land mines. HRW
concludes that the military offensive alone killed thousands of
Iraqis, nearly all of which were non-combatants. And all of this
is just Gulf War II. Gulf War I is replete with egregious war
crimes, horrific targeting mistakes, civilian slaughter and
(credible allegations of) dead Iraqis being bulldozed into
unmarked mass graves in the desert – but not by Saddam,
by the Americans! [3] Yes, who's really responsible? What of the
military aid Donald Rumsfeld organized for Iraq back in his days
in the Reagan administration which allowed Saddam to both gas
Kurds and Iranians as well as to invade Kuwait?!
It’s difficult to
compare Iraqis killed by Allied firepower and those killed by
Saddam’s henchman because of the vastly different methods
employed. The allies kill in ways that are not easy to record or
measure such as through the effects of long term radiation
poisoning from depleted uranium weapons residue or the effects
of impoverishment and starvation from sanctions.
 |
|
The ignoble
circumstances surrounding the capture of a haggard and
dejected Saddam created a very different effect in the Arab
world where it served to mortally undermine the myth of a
powerful and formidable leader. |
Saddam Hussein’s
death count is listed as 290,000 according to HRW.
“New York City-based Human Rights Watch
estimates 290,000 Iraqis disappeared under Saddam's 24-year
rule, which began in 1979.” Which puts him in the same
category as “Paraguay's ironhanded
dictator Alfredo Stroessner tortured or killed an estimated
200,000 people during his 35-year rule that ended in 1989 when
he fled to Brazil to avoid death in a coup. He is reportedly
still alive.” Never heard of Stroessner? Hey, it was news
to me too. Intriguing isn’t it? A dictator as brutal and
tyrannical as Saddam right in the Western Hemisphere! No massive
invasion, no screaming headlines, not even a campaign to arrest the guy! [4] Comforting to know that the world is a more just and
safe place thanks to Bush & Associates, isn’t it? Yes, thank you
Peter Jennings and Dan Rather for keeping America so carefully
informed day after day!
All right, all
right, we all know wars are messy affairs and innocent people
get killed. Saddam was a cookie-cutter banana-republic dictator
who admired, but couldn’t compare to, Joseph Stalin. So why the
concern? The problem resides in believing the propaganda
and attaching justice to a war effort. Far too many actually
fall for it. The American public has every reason to be critical
of the official claims being made over Iraq. The attack on Iraq
by the United States isn’t about justice nor is it about helping
the long suffering Iraqi people. If justice was really being
served then why is it that the victors never face war crimes
trials?! How is that the ‘good guys’ on our side always do the
right thing and the enemy ‘bad guys’ always do the dirty deeds?
Saddam was not a
nice guy, he lived by the sword, as the saying goes, in a very
brutal part of the world and should die by it. But that does not
excuse the intransigence and flagrant hypocrisy of the Allied
military-political machine, for as they now say in Iraq "Rah
el sani', ija el ussta" - gone is the apprentice, in
comes the master.
1. Iraq
to Stop Counting Civilian Dead , The Guardian.
2.
U.S.: Hundreds of Civilian Deaths in Iraq Were Preventable
, HRW.
3.
NEEDLESS DEATHS IN THE GULF WAR, HRW 1991.
4.
Rape, murder, torture - Saddam has place in hall of infamy,
John Yaukey Gannett News Service Dec. 14, 2003.
19.12.03 What is this
Bush-Saddam vendetta really about? Why is Saddam such an
imminent threat and primary target all of a sudden? Could it
be because Saddam didn’t want to play ball on the oil anymore?
Remember who was the darling of America back when they needed
a foil to counterbalance Iran and Saddam was happy to sell his
oil? Saddam was a valuable ally because Reagan needed him as a
secular strong-man to fight Islamic fundamentalists and
prevent the spread of Islamic revolution. But as geopolitics
shifted the relationship cooled until the Iraq invasion of
Kuwait upset the balance of oil-power. Bush Sr. slapped down
Saddam and he never forgot the insult. The last straw was
Saddam threatening to sell his oil denominated in Euros, or at
least what little oil he had left to legally sell under
sanctions. This trend if adopted by other oil producers could
quickly lead to a nightmare for America, losing its economic
control of the commodity through dollar denomination.
Bush Sr. had a very
similar problem with another American client puppet dictator,
this one a bit closer to home. He was in charge of a small but
critical Central American country, yet gradually as the Cold War
thawed and the geopolitical landscape changed he became more of
a liability than a (CIA) asset. The spin machine kicked into
high gear, vilifying and magnifying the dastardly deeds. He
wouldn’t play ball, he had to be eliminated; his name was Manuel
Noriega. Maybe Saddam and Manuel can share a prison cell?
|
What I have to do lot of times in Europe is
explain to them that Americans are not stupid, when they meet
them, they think they're very stupid because they don't know
anything, I have to explain the them that we're not stupid, I
think we¹re rather brighter than the average, but we¹re
ignorant, which means not knowing, we have no information
because it isn't given to us. - Gore Vidal |
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![[Israel's] Precision Strike 000601569c000](images/precision_strike_freydis.jpg)
